Niall Buggy is Jack Berry in Haunted at the Opera House until June 26.
“A play is never finished until it is performed.”
Niall Buggy would know. The Irish actor has had a prolific career on stage and in television.
He is an actor some audiences might struggle to place by name but his face is recognisable from countless stage productions and films, most recently the blockbuster musical Mamma Mia!
He also appeared in a memorable Father Ted episode, as game-show host Henry Sellers, who battles with falling off the wagon. Horror genre anoraks might, just might, recall his role in Hellraiser.
“I’ve never had the luxury of choosing my roles,” says the Drumcondra-born actor, who has lived in London for the last 35 years.
It’s a self-effacing comment. Others would point to the breadth of characters played by Buggy and call it versatility. We press him on what has attracted him to his roles.
“Basically, it’s the writing. It’s the desire to interpret the writer’s work.”
Buggy is in Sydney with the cast of Edna O’Brien’s Haunted. He plays Jack Berry and Academy Award nominee Brenda Blethyn plays his wife, Gladys.
The pair combine their years of experience to portray the Berry’s idiosyncratic marriage.
Working and travelling with his fellow cast members has been a pleasure. “You wouldn’t want to dislike anybody, so we’re all very good pals.”
He has won many awards; the Best Actor at the Irish Theatre Awards for Uncle Vanya; the Obie Award for Aristocrats and a coveted Laurence Olivier award for best comedy performance in 1995, for his hilarious turn as Brian in Dead Funny.
“I was absolutely thrilled because I was up against Nigel Hawthorne. I was particularly pleased because the character I played was based on a real person,” says Buggy. “And I was able to phone him up afterwards and tell him I had won.
“It’s the parts that get the awards, it’s not you. You don’t get awards for playing bad parts.”
His admiration for good writing and strongly developed characters recurs on more than one occasion as he chats over the phone. It’s the “journey of the character throughout a play” that often peaks his interest.
Song At Sunset, a play about the life of Sean O’Casey directed by his daughter Shivaun O’Casey, is a pure example of that journey. Buggy held the stage in the one-man show.
He left a New York stage wanting to relive the night’s performance with the cast: of which, he was the only member. “It’s quite a lonely thing,” he says.
Asked about stage fright, he says he hopes only to have learned some more each time he goes on stage.
“As one gets older and wiser, the terror is that you’re not aware of your own limitations,” he says.
:: Memories of TP McKenna
Irish theatre recently lost a great, with the death of TP McKenna in February, aged 81.
The Cavan native was an early example of an Irishman making it as an actor in the UK.
He had memorable roles in The Avengers, The Sweeney, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 and Minder.
For Buggy, McKenna’s death meant the passing of a good friend and, by the sound of it, a mentor.
“He was a great loss because he was such a huge, big-hearted man.”
There’s a tinge of regret when Buggy says he did not have the chance to see TP as much as he would have liked.
“I often think of TP a lot because I was on his shoulders a lot.
“He was incredibly generous with a great sense of humour and he was very sensitive to other actors’ needs.
“He was one of the first Irish actors to break free from being Irish,” he added.
Until the 1960s many Irish actors were cast solely as characters with Irish accents. McKenna pushed a door open for Buggy and his peers.
Haunted finishes its run at the Sydney Opera House on June 26.
-_2.jpg "Conron Mather and Vincent Blake from Dublin")
.jpg "Jimmy Tobin, Tom Giibbons and Seamus Gallagher from Roscommon.")
