Ciarán Hinds returns to the bad old days in Juno And The Paycock
When Ciarán Hinds was growing up in Belfast, his main entertainment was the annual Orange Order march. For a middle-class Catholic kid, that sounds pretty surprising, but then, as Hinds says: ‘We went because it was the only bloody thing happening. Rio had its carnival; Spain had its festivals; we had the triumphalist July 12 parades. But at least there were bands. Ireland in those days was practically medieval. On a Sunday, not only were the parks locked but the swings were chained up too.’
Hinds may have left Ireland in the 1970s, never again to kick a desultory ball outside the park gates when perhaps he should have been at mass, but he is currently tapping back into his country’s febrile political history in Howard Davies’s new production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno And The Paycock, a co-production between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the National in London.
This incendiary dispatch from Ireland’s 1920s civil war remains a 20th-century landmark, following the Boyle family trying to keep their heads above water amid the politics and poverty raging through the Dublin slums – despite the best efforts of Hinds’s boozy patriarch Jack, a ‘cheating, skiving, lying, indolent chancer,’ according to the actor.
As a boy from Belfast, Hinds is the first to admit the responsibility of taking on such an iconic play has been ‘a bit scary’. Not least because the production premiered in Dublin before this London opening. ‘I did think: “Holy schmoly,”’ he says with a grin. ‘The first time I worked in Dublin, I was pretty fresh out of drama school [he went to Rada after attending two law lectures at Queen’s]. And everyone I met said: “Oh, so you had to go to drama school, did you? We’re all natural here. You’re a prefabricated what, exactly?’’’
These days, the 58-year-old is a bona fide film star, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic; he lives in Paris and London with his French-Vietnamese actress girlfriend and their daughter, Aoife. A textbook character actor rather than leading man material – his tough good looks are eminently versatile – he’s notched up credits in Road To Perdition, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and the BBC/HBO series Rome (as Caesar), and been hidden by a mound of prosthetics as Albus Dumbledore’s brother, Aberforth, in the last Harry Potter film.
He’s done indie flicks (The Eclipse), TV crime capers (ITV’s Above Suspicion, which returns next January) and is soon to star in The Woman In Black, opposite Daniel Radcliffe. ‘You can tell there’s been no plan,’ he says. ‘I was always a bit of a floater. Still am.’
Most recently, he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as ‘soldier’ Roy Bland in Tomas Alfredson’s plaudit-laden Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film he signed up for not just because he knew all the cast and ‘wanted to sit round a table with them again’ but because he had been so struck by Alfredson’s beautiful vampire flick Let The Right One In.
‘Alfredson really knows what to do with a camera,’ he says. ‘I loved the fact TTSP is basically a Swedish director spying on a set of British spies.’
But it’s theatre that, for him, remains a bit special. In 1987, after several years at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, he joined Peter Brook in Paris and embarked on an 18-month tour with The Mahabharata, travelling the world with an international cast.
‘It was unbelievably exotic for a geezer like me,’ he says. ‘I thought: ‘‘How will everyone get on?’’ But it was also a great adventure. An opening to the world. It taught me to take risks. To listen. With Peter, it’s not about acting but about unlearning acting. That’s really hard.’
Hinds has lived a long way from home for many decades and, from a distance, he used to publicly criticise the Irish peace process, back in the day when progress appeared grindingly slow. ‘But my sister, who has been working in the system for a long time told me: ‘‘You have to be careful in interviews how you talk about home,’’’ he says. ‘
Because there are still people who haven’t left, trying, rather heroically and without pontificating, to get things moving forwards. I do believe in the French way, that your religion is your family’s business and it should be kept that way. From the age of four, where I grew up, there were two different schools, Catholic and Protestant, and once you have that division, so early, it’s like a rupture through society.’
How does he think Juno And The Paycock resonates today, given the recent dissident rumblings? ‘There will always be a legacy to the treaty signed between Ireland and Britain in 1921,’ he says carefully. ‘If you create borders, things don’t go away. And young people will always want to die for causes. But then it’s also up to people to take responsibility for themselves and make the best of it.’
He pauses. ‘You know, O’Casey became an international socialist. It wasn’t just politics: he was interested in improving the standard of living. And not just for the Irish but for all human beings.’
Juno And The Paycock opens Nov 16. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Metro
Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/film/881007-ciaran-hinds-returns-to-the-bad-old-days-in-juno-and-the-paycock#ixzz1d8B2To3Y
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