This much I know: Garrett Keogh

FOR an actor, every new part is both a challenge and an opportunity, and the most important journey that you will ever undertake.

My latest role is in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer where I play Richard, a Dub, fond of a jar, who recently went blind. Although he’s a mess I imagine him as an unexpected force for good in the whole shebang — as if out of the dungheap of humanity a flower will grow. Via a circuitous path he allows his brother to confront his demons and this fact of brotherly love coincides with the birth of the new light of Christmas. We are taking it on tour around the country.

I became an actor quite by accident. An uncle showed me an ad in the paper for the Abbey Theatre School of Acting, and said ‘you’d be good at that’. Many years later when it had become my profession it emerged that my mother had put him up to it. I had just finished secondary school and she had asked him ‘to do anything that would keep me off the streets that summer’. I didn’t really have a burning ambition to do anything else.

My earliest memory is of taking my first steps. And falling.

I did actually study Economics and Politics at Trinity College Dublin at the same time as attending the Abbey Theatre School of Acting. But the latter won.

For an actor a good face, or bod, or voice is useful. But a general uncertainty — that niggling questioning that is central to all art — and the courage to go there, is probably a sine qua non.

For me, work is all consuming. When you have it, you have it. When you don’t, you’re unemployed.

Any free time I do get I spend cooking, cycling to the pub and playing pool.

My first paid job was working in a dry cleaners when I was a boy.

The best advice I ever got was being told to trust my instincts. Instinct is central in the dark uncharted world of the arts.

If I could change one thing in our society I’d revisit the dreadful night of the bank bailouts. And, as a society I believe we could do with a better sense of ourselves. A sense of ‘us’, that includes everyone; a sense of ownership, in that what we have belongs to us all and is there to share. So that we all only have a loan of the resources. For example, the roads aren’t mine to do what I want on, whether speed or litter; they belong to us all, we share the benefits, we share the responsibilities. Yeah, something like that, something that they began to teach in school when I was leaving — I think they called it Civics.

I don’t believe in God. A fella with long hair and a beard that somehow gave all those other fellas the keys to one of the biggest businesses on earth? Are you joking me?

My mother died earlier this year. And though I have known other deaths, been to other funerals, and expressed condolence and sympathy, I realised then that I knew sweet Fanny Adams about bereavement.

If I wasn’t acting now, I would probably be a writer.

So far, life has taught me that we are so small. And we think we are so big.

My home is bright. When the moon is full I can walk around without the lights on.

The trait I most admire in others is kindness.

My worst habit is taking the phone from my ear or my mouth before I have finished saying goodbye — or so I’m told.

Garrett Keogh tours in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer until December 3 to theatres in Longford, Cavan, Roscommon, Mullingar, Letterkenny, Newbridge and Galway.

Picture: Brian Farrell