Back as Captain Jack
HE has worked with iconic film directors Stephen Spielberg (Munich), Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition), and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), yet it was in theatre that Ciarán Hinds gained a reputation as an actor of presence and subtlety. The Belfast native is back on an Irish stage this week, in the Abbey’s new production of Juno and the Paycock playing tragi-comic drunkard ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle. The cast includes Sinéad Cusack as Juno and Risteard Cooper as Joxer Daly.
A graduate of RADA, Hinds distinguished himself in British productions throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, among them Peter Brooks’ epic adaptation of The Mahabharata. Hinds was also prominent in Irish theatre, collaborating with Druid and Field Day, and starring in productions at the Abbey, the Lyric in Belfast, and the Project Arts Centre in Dublin.
During these early years, says Hinds, “it was just me with two bags, free, a ‘strolling player’. I didn’t have a base. I just kept going from place to place. But then you have a family and you need to be more responsible.” He and his long-term partner, actress Hélène Patarot, reside in France. They have a daughter, Aoife, born in 1991.
If family life has triggered a reduction in Hinds’s theatre work, so too has the enormous rise in his stock as a screen actor, in blockbuster films like Tomb Raider or television hits such as Rome (in which he played Julius Caesar). He is currently on the big screen in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which stars Gary Oldman.
Recently, Hinds has returned to the stage. In 2007, he played the diabolical Mr Lockhart in Conor McPherson’s Broadway hit, The Seafarer, and in 2009 he had the lead in McPherson’s adaptation of The Birds at the Gate Theatre. (For McPherson, he also starred in 2010 film The Eclipse.) The new production of Juno is a return for Hinds to Ireland’s national theatre after 20 years. He played the part before. In 1983, while a young man, Hinds ‘aged up’ to play ‘Captain’ Boyle in a production for Glasgow Citizens Theatre. “That was a long, long time ago, in my infancy,” he says.
“That show has faded very much in memory but I remember the play did kick off in Glasgow, partly because it’s such a magnificent work, but also because there were a lot of Irish people in that community who felt an affinity with the characters,” he says.
O’Casey’s play, set in the Dublin tenements during the Irish civil war, has an emotional charge. Its withered, resilient humanism has a searing intensity. Representing a specimen at the frayed edges of human decency, the chronic wastrel Jack Boyle is a character with whom the audience finds a perverse sympathy despite his having few redeeming qualities.
“The ‘Captain,’ says Hinds, is “a chancer, a skiver, a liar, a cheat, and a bully. He’s aggressive and drunk. What’s appealing about that? Yet you have to make him human somewhere, whether it’s through his sense of wonder or of loss.”
In taking on the role, Hinds is following two great icons of Irish theatre — Barry Fitzgerald, who starred in the original 1924 production, and Dónal McCann, whose turn in the Gate Theatre’s 1988 revival was celebrated.
Hinds was McCann’s co-star in the wonderful 1991 film December Bride, and he regrets not having seen the late Dubliner’s famed performance in Juno.
“That was one I was very sad to miss,” he says. “For me, he was our greatest actor. With some people there is a soul that comes on stage with them that is beyond acting. It’s something else. Donal just had that in spades.”
A similarly intangible quality might be said to mark Hinds’s own style. Certainly, his film work is renowned for the profound earthiness and behavioural nuance that he brings to bear on his characters. Hinds — who has a pleasantly laid-back and bohemian aspect in person — shies away from too much self-analysis.
Hinds says that his job is just “to service a part in the landscape of the story.” But he does confide an observation that his agent once made about his acting. “He said that rather than my going out to the camera, the camera comes in to me. Now I don’t know what that means. But in theatre, you sometimes have to go ‘bigger’ than you might like to, yet at the same time keep a sense of absolute truth. But once you start performing for camera, then the camera is watching for the humanity, for the breathing and for the behavioural patterns,” he says.
Conveying the living, breathing organism beneath his characters is Hinds’s strong suit. There’s a deep physicality to his style, a grace and presence that surely stem in part from his training in Irish dancing. Intriguingly, the actor attributes a great deal of his personality to being Irish.
It tells in everything, he says: “it’s what lifts your spirits, what depresses you, how your feet move naturally to certain tunes, that awful mixture of life lived between a lament and a reel.”
Raised in a Catholic family in Belfast, Hinds’s father was a doctor and his mother a teacher who performed in amateur theatre. Having left the city to study acting with RADA in the mid-1970s, and having since then spent a lifetime travelling the world on different projects, he has watched the peace process unfold largely from the outside-looking-in.
Yet he has remained close to developments via his sister, Bronagh, a civil rights activist of long-standing who, through the Women’s Coalition, was involved first hand in the process.
Being outside of Ireland gave him some perspective, he says.
“It’s not like I ran out. My work took me away. But being removed a little bit, everything opens up a bit more. You get a bit of air.
“All those people involved in the stuff in the North were just locked banging at each other for a very long time. But you get outside it and you say ‘Have a look at the world. Open up.’
“But progress has been made,” he says. “There’s no denying it. And it will continue to be made. Things are moving forward.”
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