Holed up in Bolivia
FAMED for his languid disposition on stage and screen, Irish actor Stephen Rea is laid back in real life too. The Belfast man is eloquent, but speaks in a slow yet measured canter, and his tranquil voice seldom diverts from a default setting of ‘hushed tone’.
Little wonder many of the characters Rea has played have been melancholy.
His latest part is no different. In Blackthorn — an elegiac western that revives the cine-myth of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — Rea plays an ex-detective convinced that Cassidy (Sam Shepard) is alive, and so has spent three whiskey-addled decades going to seed in a small Bolivian village awaiting the outlaw’s return.
“McKinley is a kind of rapacious bounty hunter, and yet the years have affected him,” says Rea. “He’s sat around and looked at these Indians and he’s felt a sympathy for them. There’s something terribly moving about a guy who has come to that accommodation with himself. In the end, he won’t betray the Indians and he won’t betray Butch, because that would be to betray the Indians as well.”
The film — a European and Bolivian co-production — is directed by Spaniard Gil Mateo, and it features the most sumptuous desert photography this side of John Ford’s Monument Valley. The central attraction is Shepard’s mesmerising turn as Butch Cassidy. Imbuing the outlaw with grace, gristle, and gravitas, Shepard — a horse-loving cowboy — is at home in the role. It reminds you that, while he may be one of America’s greatest living dramatists, theatre’s gain has been cinema’s loss as good roles for Shepard as an actor have been far too few.
“Sam is the only actor I know who could stand up to that landscape and who could carry the character through the vastness of that landscape,” says Rea. “Because he himself has inhabited that kind of landscape. He’s chosen it. So you believe him when he’s riding through the landscape, not just because he’s an expert horse-rider, but because the face fits.”
Especially striking in the film is a chase sequence shot on Bolivia’s sublime white salt flats. It is rare to find an original image in genre cinema, let alone in a Western, but these salt flats are spectacular.
“I’ve been out on those flats and it’s extraordinary,” says Rea. “There’s a guy driving you and you’re thinking to yourself ‘I hope he knows this place like long-haired Kearns going through the old bogs, y’know, because I don’t know how we’re getting out of here if he doesn’t’.”
Blackthorn is many things, but at its heart it’s a meditation on the complexities of friendship. Even though they are antagonists, Shepard’s mythic outlaw and Rea’s tragic lawman share a perverse bond.
“They’re wedded together,” says Rea. “It’s a terrible marriage, isn’t it? The pursuer and the pursued. And that’s what interested me in the role. And maybe the fact that Sam and I are friends carried into that.”
Rea and Shepard have been cohorts since the early 1970s when the Irishman, then a young graduate of the Abbey Theatre, starred in a London production of Shepard’s absurdist play Geography of a Horse Dreamer. In recent years, he has starred in two new Shepard plays, Kicking a Dead Horse and Ages of the Moon, that have premiered in the Abbey.
Asked what first made the two men simpatico, Rea grasps at a number of things, chief among them a mutual love of Samuel Beckett’s work.
“But, you know, a friendship doesn’t come out of something like that really,” he says in reflection. “It just came out of something chemical between us. And I didn’t see him for a long time, but we picked up immediately when we met again. Then, he wrote that play, Kicking a Dead Horse, and he says that he wrote it with me in mind. So I’ve seen a lot of him over the last few years and it’s a good friendship because we don’t depend on each other. We don’t expect anything.”
Rea describes Shepard as “the inheritor of Beckett.
“He’s dealing with theatre in the way that Beckett deals with it. Beckett says he can’t explain Godot. He says: ‘I started with the image of a tree on an empty stage and went from there’. Kicking a Dead Horse starts with the image of a dead horse and an empty stage and it goes from there. Nothing’s ruled out. Nothing’s ruled in. And it makes for very exciting theatre — a poetic theatre,” Rea says.
Rea’s path as an actor has been marked by many striking alliances over the years, not the least of which was his influential collaboration with Brian Friel in setting up the Field Day theatre company in 1980.
It is for his recurrent appearances in the films of Neil Jordan, however, that Rea is perhaps most famous. The Belfast man starred in Jordan’s first film, Angel, in 1981, and earned renown in Jordan classics such as The Crying Game and The Butcher Boy.
Has he ever asked Jordan what it is that he sees in him?
“I dare not,” says Rea. “We never talk that much on the set about what it is. He would just tell you the story. But I’ve always felt that cinema acting is really about allowing the camera to look at you, because it will see things that you’re not consciously doing. It’s not that I think that acting is not a conscious art, because I think it is. It’s as conscious an art as writing. But I have said to younger actors that I do think it’s about allowing the camera to look at you. And that requires nerve, in a way.”
Rea cites Hollywood icon Robert Mitchum as the paradigm for this sort of acting. “You get a close-up on Mitchum and you can go anywhere with the movie,” he says.
“He is really unbelievable. Maybe he just had tremendous repose as a person.”
Of course, Rea’s own acting style is similarly marked by a suggestive minimalism. Alas, this is sometimes mistaken for downright gloominess.
“I know,” says Rea. “It’s so unfair. Maybe in repose I look depressed or something, but I’m not a depressed person. When we were doing The Butcher Boy, Ian Hart said that he had been doing a scene with me where he was trying to do ‘less’ than me. And he gave up. He says: ‘it can’t be done’.”
* Blackthorn is released in the Lighthouse, Dublin today.
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