Our series features INSPIRING WOMEN alongside local heroines possessed of spirit, style, Humanity and Humour. This week’s focus is on actor Derbhle Crotty.
Derbhle Crotty. Height: 5’8″. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Green.
So begins the cv of one of Ireland’s leading actors. A ruse, a breadcrumb trail, an attempt to throw us off the track, perhaps? Agent-speak designed to lull casting directors into thinking she’d be ‘right’ for the part, she’ll fit the costume, she won’t tower over the leading man that much?
What savvy casting directors know about Cavan-born Derbhle Crotty is that she IS the leading man, the leading lady, the ingenue and the character actor.
Critics lauded her as a strutting Bolingbroke and a bloodstained steely Henry IV in Mark O’Rowe’s Henriad, DruidShakespeare’s gender-blind reimagining of four historical plays directed by Garry Hynes, with sold-out runs in Ireland and New York in 2015.
We’ve seen her on the Abbey and Peacock stage in, among others The Dead, An Ideal Husband, A Month in the Country, The Plough and the Stars, Bailengangaire, Portia Coughlan, The Mai, Katie Roche and The Well of the Saints at the Edinburgh Festival.
Frequently nominated, Derbhle bagged a well-deserved Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Actress in 2008 as Masha in the Abbey’s production of Three Sisters.
Derbhle has worked extensively in London, appearing at The Royal Court in The Alice Trilogy and The Weir and in many National Theatre and RSC productions, playing Ophelia in Hamlet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She mesmerized as Hecuba in Marina Carr’s play at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and in The Beauty Queen of Linane at The Young Vic.
Crotty’s credits extend to tv and film, including Notes on a Scandal. Although we don’t tend to be star struck, running into her in Dublin recently, coiled ropes of chestnut hair framing an open, expressive face, we lost the run of ourselves, blurting out “We love you!”, unaware of whether it’s Derbhle herself we are enamoured with or the depth she brings to every role that resonates with us.
Derbhle Crotty is no ordinary panto. Audiences respond to her accessibility, her earthy comic streak, her emotional range, her sense of truth and her intelligence, qualities she brings to the party as part of Garry Hynes’ rolling ensemble at Druid and with Annie Ryan’s Corn Exchange, two companies run by extraordinary women creating groundbreaking work.
There’s something about Derbhle Crotty that prompts us to engage in the film version of fantasy football: say, picturing her in the Leonardo Di Caprio role in Iñárritu’s The Revenant, or as Ada McGrath in Jane Campion’s The Piano or as any of the tragicomic inmates in Orange is the New Black. Hollywood demands a disproportionate degree of ambition and punishing physical maintenance from its players, but if talent and craft ruled, then Crotty has earned her place on our dream team.
Derbhle took to the Abbey stage in quite a different role during November’s Waking the Feminists event (or WTF? – a question we still ask ourselves as we bang our heads against the glass ceiling, even as we approach 2016) articulating the frustrations of every woman working for a place in the theatre and a place in the world. Unscripted, Derbhle Crotty speaks for all of us, no matter the stage or stage of life. We reprint her testimony here, so that one day WTF? might be a question we ask about other, more frivolous aspects of our lives, when nations have awoken to the value of women’s work, when we can avail of the same opportunities afforded men, when we receive equal pay for equal work, when we step into our power. When, if not now?
From #wakingthefeminists, November 11, 2015:
“I’m a counter of women. In casts, in stories, on panels, in promotions, on radio, in children’s cartoons. My counting is compulsive and self-defeating, as I am almost invariably depressed by the tally. I have raged at Guinness ads, period dramas, talk shows, you name it, for the brazen invisibility of women. So, when I scanned the Abbey 2016 programme, my automatic tally told me that the stats had higher than usual testosterone levels. I sighed my usual sigh and went about my business. But others didn’t sigh, they shouted, and the shout reverberated and has found thousands of echoes.”
“In terms of female collaborators I have had a blessed career; my first show in the Abbey was Katie Roche, by Teresa Deevy, directed by Judy Friel. My (almost) next show there was Marina’s The Mai, which had a cast of seven women and one man; Portia Coughlan, directed by Garry Hynes, followed soon after that. I have since worked with the foregoing and many other extraordinary women, including Annie Ryan, Carmel Winters, Erica Whyman. I have played an English king in DruidShakespeare. I name all of these, as I want to acknowledge the privilege it has been to truly have been part of the national conversation in all of these plays and collaborations. And I want much, much more of this, for myself, for my fellow actors, particularly the bright and hungry young, and for our ready audience.”
As Markiewicz said in October 1915, “Lately things seem to be changing…so now again a strong tide of liberty seems to be coming towards us, swelling and growing and carrying before it all the outposts that hold women enslaved and bearing them triumphantly into the life of the nation to which they belong.”
Derbhle Crotty appears in Juno and the Paycock, directed by Mark O’Rowe, at the Gate Theatre from 11th February 2016.