Interview - Pauline McLynn: From Craggy Island to Beckett masterpiece

Most famous for insisting Father Ted have a cup of tea, Pauline McLynn is in Sheffield with a theatre masterpiece. Nick Ahad spoke to her.

It is always with trepidation you interview someone like Pauline McLynn.

An accomplished actor, she is also the author of five novels, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and is working on a play for Radio Four.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

However, for many she will always be the tea-obsessed Mrs Doyle, the housekeeper who was forever offering the priests on Craggy Island a beverage.

To ask her about the tea or not? Aware that some actors can be sniffy about roles with which they have become synonymous, particularly when there is clearly much else on their CV, it is difficult to know how to broach the subject.

“I’m actually sitting here with a cup of tea,” offers McLynn when the question of Mrs Doyle comes up, the Galway accent as strong as remembered from those brilliant episodes of Father Ted.

“Isn’t that a coincidence?” she laughs. It is, but it is much more then that, it’s a relief – McLynn is clearly not the sort to take it badly when she’s asked about playing one of ‘those’ sorts of roles – the sort that can dominate a whole career.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“It’s something that renews itself all the time because Father Ted is always being repeated and so it reaches a new generation. And it is such a loved show with loved characters, so it’s wonderful.

“It was a great show to work on and God love them for writing it with me in mind.”

To become the character she played in Father Ted she spent plenty of time in the make-up chair being de-beautified, which is why she was in for a bit of a shock on her way into rehearsals this morning, she says.

“I walked past this lad and he said, ‘isn’t that Mrs Doyle?’ I wouldn’t have minded so much, but I had a bit of make up on. I even shaved this morning. So I thought: ‘that there’s a bit of a shocker’,” laughs McLynn.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Funny, attractive, intelligent and talented, McLynn is also clearly a popular actor in Sheffield, where she is appearing in the Studio theatre in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

When I call there are shrieks of laughter in the background, from, it transpires, the stage crew. When she answers the phone, it is with an apology – “I was just finishing a story and I had to get to the punchline.”

She is going to need to call on all her qualities if she is to hold the stage for the two hours (“although Mr Beckett does allow us a nice interval”) of Happy Days, considered one of Beckett’s most difficult and most brilliant pieces of writing.

In it Winnie is buried up to her waist in the earth, a position from which she is unable to shift and into which she finds herself sinking further. It is one of the few roles written for women that is considered to approach the depth and complexity of a part like Hamlet in Western theatre. Peggy Ashcroft referred to it as a summit role.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is also one that McLynn is working seriously hard at mastering.

“Oh, I cannot tell you how, if Mr Beckett was here, I would never tire of slapping him. Every couple of hours the director lets me go off into the corner and have a really good old swear,” she says. “It is supposed to be one of those biggest, longest parts for a women. There’s a lot of words, for sure.”

McLynn always refers to “Mr” Beckett, one suspects out of a combination of respect and the fact that she does not like him enough to give him his first name, having spent so long grappling with his script.

“The problem really is how specific Mr Beckett is. If you substitute one of your own words for one of his, you get a few pages on and realise there was a very good reason he used that word and you’re stuck and you end up in a spiral out of which you can’t climb and the evening is over in less than an hour.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

While watching Happy Days can be an intense experience it is ultimately, says McLynn, a piece of entertainment.

She describes Winnie as one of life’s positive people – despite the fact that she ends up buried up to her neck by the end of the play. “It is the sort of play where people will enjoy it and then afterwards, over a glass of wine, it will suddenly hit them and they’ll think ‘oh, that’s what it was about’,” says McLynn.

McLynn insists that, while people might be aware they are seeing a masterpiece, Happy Days is first and most importantly an entertaining play.

At least, it is for the audience.

“They’ll enjoy it, even if it’s pretty terrifying from where I’m standing.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Happy Days, Sheffield Studio, to June 4. 0114 249 6000, www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk

Background to a drama classic

Produced in New York in 1961, Beckett’s Happy Days won an award for Ruth White, playing Winnie.

The play was produced a year later at the Royal Court and troubled critics – even Kenneth Tynan, who famously rescued Waiting for Godot with a positive review, called it “a metaphor extended beyond its capacity”. It is considered one of contemporary theatre’s great roles for women. Fiona Shaw, who starred in it at the National Theatre in 2007, said it was “all interrupted thought”.

Related topics: