Just so good at being bad

THE past 18 months have seen Mark O’Regan putting together some gallery of rogues on the Irish stage. In the Abbey Theatre’s Alice in Funderland he played an insidiously smug politician, the ‘Minister for All Your Needs’.

A few months later he was Rich, the grotesque bank boss in Anglo: the Musical. And now, scoring a hat-trick of sneaky, oily feckers, he can be seen onstage at the Gate playing that most impeccable of corrupt capitalist bastards, Mr Peachum, in a new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.

“Yeah, I suppose they’re all a bit wacky,” says O’Regan of the three characters, his Cork brogue undiminished by two decades living in Dublin’s big smoke.