Stephen Rea: 'I never wanted to be a polite actor'

I ask Rea, 69, how difficult it has been to play the role night after night. “It’s distressing but I’m not cracking up or anything, you know what I mean?” he says with a dark laugh. “It is a bit like King Lear, you know, that [Eric] has misunderstood his world and now he can’t cope with what is happening in it and he starts to destroy it.”

Rea has never shied away from playing edgy, unappealing roles. Think of Fergus, the IRA terrorist in The Crying Game, the alcoholic father Da Brady in the 1997 film The Butcher Boy, and most recently the Machiavellian Kuragin in the television adaptation of War and Peace.

His genius is to make the unsympathetic ooze with sympathy. He is the master of ambivalence and conflicted morality. So it is no surprise that the play’s author David Ireland, who grew up among Unionists in Belfast, wrote the part of Eric specifically with Rea in mind. If anyone can tease out the play’s nuance, surely Rea is the man.

Provocative though the play is, it is not ill-thought through. Opening just a few weeks before the centenary of the Easter Rising, it is a violent play about the pointlessness of violence, a painful parable about the cost of sectarianism and the refusal to break down barriers.

Rea certainly hopes that his performance will help to nudge the debate on, rather than further entrench attitudes. “The terrible thing is that Eric was once an innocent little 10-year-old boy,” he says. “But people have been mercilessly trapped in that sectarian world, you know, and I do think a play like this might help people say, 'Hang on a minute, there is something in here that is very warm and generous – that is also a bit mad’. But it’s the size of [David Ireland’s] vision that can help you get out of the impasse that people are in. I think, I think,” he says, metaphorically crossing his fingers. 

Born to Protestant parents in Belfast, Rea seems to have spent his life trying to kick down barriers and defy categorisation. Professionally, he’s as happy to play IRA terrorists as paranoid Loyalists. Personally, too, he has made decisions that – like them or not – demonstrate a determination to live life according to his own lights.

For two decades between the early 1980s and 2003, he was married to Dolours Price, who was given a life sentence for her involvement in the IRA bombing of the Old Bailey in 1973, which injured 200 people and left one dead from a heart attack. She was released after seven years on humanitarian grounds and shortly after married Rea, and they had two sons.

In 2010, she hit the headlines again when she claimed Gerry Adams had been her IRA commander and that he was responsible for the death in 1972 of Jean McConville, accused by the IRA of being an informer. Price had driven McConville to the place where she was killed. Price died in 2013 and Adams continues categorically to deny her claims.

This is all heavy stuff, which Rea usually declines to talk about, but today when I ask him whether he was made to suffer both personally and professionally for his decision to marry Price, he replies after a pause, haltingly, his voiced tinged with emotion: “No. I’ll tell you. The people in my profession were enormously generous about it. I never, ever stopped working. But it meant certain things that I might say would be interpreted in a narrower way than I intended. And that’s difficult if you’re doing theatre or anything.” You’re referring to reporters, I ask? “Mm. Always restricting, in a sense, and I’ve always attempted to not be restricted by any label – a sectarian label or otherwise, you know.”

And what about Price, did her tribe reject her for marrying a Protestant? “No, not at all,” he says. “No, I mean, when you say Protestant, I’m not a very self-conscious Protestant. In fact, I’m not baptised in any religion, OK.” This is as close to irritation as I sense in his voice, before he softens to a joke. “So that makes it, 'Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?’ I’m not baptised in any religion and I had no connection to Loyalist politics.”

Rea’s father was a bus driver, his mother a housewife. He describes the world he grew up in in the 1950s as a time of brief liberation before the sectarian walls came down again in the late 1960s. “I grew up in a mixed area, with mixed neighbours and mixed friends and my father drank – rather a lot – with both sides because it was that kind of place.”

He studied English literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, and drama at the Abbey Theatre School in Dublin before progressing to the Royal Court in London, then the Old Vic and the National Theatre. In 1980, he and Brian Friel set up their own company, Field Day Theatre Company, which toured theatreless corners of Ireland and encouraged a new generation of Irish playwrights.

Rea says that his own favourite playwrights are Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, and, charmingly humble from an actor who could make claim to be one of the greatest of his generation, regards himself as “immensely fortunate” to have got to work with them all.

He reminisces about a night in 1976 after he opened at the Royal Court in Beckett’s Endgame. “Harold [Pinter] was at the opening night and we’d all sat in [the designer] Jocelyn Herbert’s house in Holland Park, with Beckett playing the piano,” then hearing the note of wan nostalgia in his voice brings himself back down to Earth, “Oh, please.”

Rea has, of course, worked in Hollywood many times, but has never been tempted to move there. He says: “Hollywood made me laugh, you know, because they believe in it all with such intensity and careers are built on awards ceremonies and I just found it hilarious. You know, we’ve adopted it here with the Baftas. It’s all razzmatazz. I don’t understand it.”

Rea shows no sign of slowing down. He’s clearly happiest when working, though he takes it a bit easier on the booze nowadays when doing a stage play. “I used to do a bit of drinking after a play with the cast, but I never do any more,” he says ruefully.

The rise and rise of the TV series and box sets has served him well. Indeed, if you look at the most intriguing dramas of the past couple of years, the thing that links them all is Rea: Dickensian, Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman, War and Peace.

He lets drop that there is another Blick drama in the pipeline and a possible spin-off for his character Inspector Bucket. He says he rarely takes holiday so leapt at the opportunity to travel abroad on location to St Petersburg for War and Peace. Is he a loner on location or does he socialise with the cast? “There was a very convivial cast in War and Peace.” Were you a ringleader? “Of revelment?” he raises his eyebrows. “Well there are a few ringleaders, but it’s Russia, they have vodka, you know."

He talks with great gusto about the talent of the young actors with whom he found himself working: “Tuppence Middleton, Jessie Buckley, Lily James, remarkable, and they seem to me to be better than the actors we were when we were that age. More confident, more intellectual assurance.”

All of which is fine, but wasn’t there also something more vital about the time Rea was coming to acting in the 1960s? It wasn’t just about building a film career and making money, something more was at stake. He stops to consider whether things were better back then. “It was people who had experience of rock ’n’ roll and wanted to dress that way and didn’t want to be polite actors. We wanted to be artists, you know. That was the release of the Sixties. You were supposed to live.”

Cyprus Avenue is at The Royal Court, London SW1 (royalcourttheatre.com; 020 7565 5000) from April 5 to May 7