David Rawle, who came to prominence playing the lead role in Chris O’Dowd’s Moone Boy, spoke to David Hennessy ahead of his making his London stage debut in Teresa Deevy’s Wife to James Whelan at Jermyn Street Theatre.
People first saw David Rawle on their screens as Martin Moone in Chris O’Dowd’s autobiographical Sky comedy series, Moone Boy.
Just 11 at the time, David played O’Dowd’s childhood self with O’Dowd sharing the screen with him as his imaginary friend.
It was just last year that David reconnected with O’Dowd playing a main part in his more recent series, Small Town, Big Story.
Other screen roles include the animation Song of the Sea, Pixie and the Irish- Australian children’s drama, Drop Dead Weird.
His theatre credits include Amsterdam, Afterwards (Dublin Fringe Festival), A Night at the Movies (Abbey Theatre, Dublin), The Borrowers (Gate Theatre, Dublin), Danti-Dan (Ireland tour), and The Blackwater Lightship (Gaiety Theatre, Dublin).
David is making his London stage debut in Teresa Deevy’s Wife to James Whelan at Jermyn Street Theatre.
A forgotten classic from a largely forgotten playwright, the play is described as a timeless story of love and pride.
Deevy’s play explores ambition, compromise, and the role of women in Ireland, as personal desire collides with social expectation.
The story takes us to a small town in 1937 Ireland.
When James Whelan lands a job in Dublin, he hopes his sweetheart Nan will wait for him but she has plans of her own.
When he returns home seven years later, his return will affect not only Nan but the whole town.
Mint Theater Company’s Artistic Director Jonathan Bank directs a cast that also includes Darragh Feehely, Clíona Flynn, Eavan Gaffney, Molly Hanly, Fiach Kunz, Patrick McBrearty, and Benjamin Reilly.
Teresa Deevy’s works include Katie Roche, A Disciple, Temporal Powers, The King of Spain’s Daughter, Reapers, The Wild Goose – all staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
However her relationship with the theatre would sour when Wife to James Whelan was rejected.
David Rawle took time out of rehearsals to talk to the Irish World.
How are rehearsals going? It must be really exciting to work on this text with such a young cast..
“It really is.
“To be trusted with great writing like this, it’s incredibly exciting.”
There is a number of the cast, including yourself, making their London stage debut. Is that exciting?
“Yes, absolutely it is.
“It’s such a fundamentally Irish play.
“I turned around earlier in one of my scenes and one of my lines is, ‘Careful now’ and I said, ‘This is really gonna ring with a modern audience with Father Ted at the back of their mind’.
“But yeah, first time doing a show in London which is really, really exciting.
“I don’t know if I’ll be lucky enough to be back but this one will always be special because it is Irish and because it is an all Irish cast and of people who are so young.
“Honestly every single day I’m blown away by the work that I’m seeing in front of me and I think the audiences will be too.”
Do you think Teresa Deevy is underappreciated as a playwright?
“Absolutely.
“She has one play, Katie Roche, that some people might be a little bit more familiar with but so much of her other works are neglected and forgotten and just completely pushed to one side.
“I think she might be reduced to a one hit wonder but actually there’s so much beautiful work that’s just completely lost and it’s so wonderful to get a chance like this.
“I think Jonathan saw her name written in a book about the history of the Abbey Theatre but there was nothing written about her.
“It was literally just, ‘This woman had six plays..’
“He could see them listed in six years on in the Abbey Theatre in the 30s and 40s and then suddenly it all stopped with this play, Wife to James Whelan.
“He thought to himself, ‘I wonder what this play was about’.
“He read it and he fell in love with it and that was his introduction to her work with the one that was first rejected and seeing that it was because of the changing politics of the time and there was new management in the Abbey.
“He thought that this play deserved a lot more recognition than it got at the time.
“I actually did Katie Roche in college so I was familiar with her work but, as I say, I wasn’t aware of any of this other stuff.
“There’s so many Irish playwrights that we revere from that time: JM Synge, O’Casey and obviously Yeats and I feel like her name should be listed among them whenever we talk about the greats of Irish theatre because I do really think that she was up there with the best of them.”
There must be a sense of responsibility in that case..
“There’s also a freedom in it at the same time because with a play that everybody knows, people might have seen another production or studied it and so they might have a stronger idea of what it should be whereas with this, because people are so unfamiliar with it, you have a bit more freedom with how you interpret it.
“But you do want to honour her work because this will be for a lot of people their first introduction to her work.”
As you say no one knows Teresa Deevy better than Jonathan Banks..
“It’s almost like he has a personal relationship with her work and it’s just been wonderful to mine him for information, that’s kind of invaluable because sometimes with those kind of writers you’re filling in a lot of the blanks yourself.
“That kind of attention to detail is so reassuring to an actor because you know we’re in safe hands.
“Of course the thing that people might know about Teresa Deevy is that she was deaf from the age of about 19 or 20 and the story is that she would have gone to London to study lip reading.
“While she was there, they recommended to go to the theatre because that was where people enunciated the best and she would be most able to understand what they were saying and that was kind of how she fell in love with theatre.
“To hear Jonathan speak about those stories and to hear beyond the Wikipedia version and to really get into the nitty gritty of what actually happened and what kind of person she actually was revealed so much and so having that biography that isn’t just, ‘She was born x and died y and went to this school’, kind of filling in the gaps in that biography is fascinating.”
The show depicts a very different Ireland..
“Totally but there’s a lot of lines that I say and I think, ‘God, I felt that’.
“It is very universal in that it’s just about people who are trying to get on.
“There’s a question about ambition versus contentment in the play, about how much should everything in your life be about getting forward and moving on to the next step and then also, if you’re too content with where you are, then what are you kind of letting slip by you?
“But then if you’re too much of one or the other, you lose out on actually appreciating anything.
“All of those things: Who are you going to end up with and people falling in love with the wrong person and people having all these great feelings that they don’t express or they try and say something but it’s the wrong time or it’s the wrong person- I feel like those things are what makes it.
“If we all came out in modern clothes and did this play, I do feel like it would work.
“There’s certain things which are definitely rooted in the time and there’s other things that feel like they could have been written yesterday.”
Maybe if James hadn’t gone anywhere, he and Nan could have been perfectly happy but there’s no guarantees about that either..
“He would have always wanted more from wherever he was so would he have resented her for holding him back? Or would he have been able to accept the situation and move on?
“We don’t know but Jonathan said what live theatre can do more than any other medium is you can see in real time people having to live with regret.
“The audience is taken along on that journey where you watch somebody making the wrong choice and then having to live with that choice and to see that play out there in front of you is, I think, what keeps people coming back to the theatre.
“You feel like you’re a part of the story in a way that sometimes you don’t in other mediums.”
Tell us about your character Apollo Moran. He’s the bookkeeper in the shop..
“He’s maybe got notions is the first thing I’ll say about Apollo.
“He definitely thinks that he should be running the place and he’s probably a little bit fond of himself.
“Despite having the exact same education as everybody else, he’s quite verbose and he likes to make a meal of the ways that he says every single phrase.
“He couldn’t just say good morning, he’d have to say, ‘Good morrow to you, kind sir’.
“I’m still trying to find out who he is and there’s so many wonderful clues in the text but he is quite ambiguous because she doesn’t write people who are one thing or another, they’re constantly changing and they’re constantly contradicting themselves.
“He is larger than life, he is a real character and I would argue the best character in the play.
“Certainly a lot of the comedy comes from the clashes that he has with his boss who is his old childhood friend and how he feels that he would be doing a better job around the place than his boss which has just been a joy to play.”
You came to prominence starring in Moone Boy when you were just a boy yourself, was that all a crazy time?
“I don’t think it was completely crazy.
“There were moments of madness within it but from when it started, it was just something that kind of fell out of the sky into my lap. I was just delighted to be out of school for a few weeks.
“Then I kind of fell in love with it.
“I had no ambitions or dreams of being an actor, it was just something that kind of happened and suddenly I found, ‘I actually really enjoy this’.
“I was working with incredible people who are so talented and so successful and I had absolutely no idea who they were because I was 11 years old and so I was able to just be myself and just work with them and feel equal to everybody.
“Because when you’re 11, you don’t doubt yourself.
“You don’t question the things that you’re doing, you just kind of go with whatever feels right.
“It was just gas craic to be honest.
“Every day was a joy.
“When it was so well received and people were so positive, it was lovely.
“It was never really annoying or frustrating being maybe stopped in the street or people wanting to talk about it because they were talking about something that they cared about and that they genuinely seemed to enjoy.
“To have been a small part of that was really just lovely.”
You say it dropped into your lap, how did it come about?
“I was going to youth theatre.
“I loved youth theatre.
“I did it in Carrigallen in Leitrim where I’m from and they were like, ‘An audition has come through and they’re looking for people in the area’.
“Chris is from Boyle in Roscommon so they were looking for people in the west of a certain age and so Amy Rowan, a wonderful casting director, reached out to a stage schools and youth theatres around that area.
“I had never auditioned for anything before and it sounded fun so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go for that, why not?’
“We didn’t really know what it was.
“I thought, ‘This is quite fun but I’m not going to go for the main part because I’m not going to get the main part, I’ll go for the friend’.
“So I did the audition and I had a great time but then I went home and I was like, ‘That was fun’.
“And then maybe a week or so later, they were like, ‘We’d like to see him again but we’d like to see him for the lead role’.
“And I was like, ‘Well, that’s kind of strange but okay…’
“And so I learned the lines and I went to the audition and I did it and I was like, ‘Well that was fun but nothing’s gonna come of that’.
“And then a week later, they were like, ‘Okay, it’s down to him and two other guys and we want to read him opposite some other people. He’s going to meet Chris and he’s going to meet the director’.
“And I didn’t know who these people were so I said, ‘Sure, yeah, that sounds like fun’.
“And I met Chris for the first time and the wonderful Declan Lowney who directed the first series and he directed Father Ted and now he’s gone on to do Ted Lasso and all these incredible projects.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, that’ll be fun’.
“And then I did it and then suddenly was like, ‘Oh, I think I kind of want this’.
“And about a week later they rang and they were like, ‘We’d love to offer you the part’.
“And it completely changed my life and, as I say, it was outside of anything that I’d ever considered doing or considered possible.
“They were looking for an idiot boy from the West of Ireland and by God, they found him.”
What was it like to reconnect with Chris O’Dowd starring in his more recent show Small Town, Big Story last year?
“That was so incredible to be working together again.
“It was a shame we didn’t have any scenes together.
“I would have really, really enjoyed that but it was just wonderful.
“He was directing and he was writing and to be back in that dynamic, it just felt so familiar.
“It felt really safe.
“He’s such a wonderful writer.
“The people that I was working with were just at the top of their game.
“I was just overjoyed to be back together with him again and to be getting to bring his wonderfully mad imagination to life.”
So was doing Moone Boy when you knew you loved acting?
“I honestly don’t even know that I can say that it was.
“I loved being on a film set.
“But even at 11, I think I was mature enough to kind of go, ‘But I don’t know if I want to do this for the rest of my life’.
“It wasn’t until I was about 16 and I was doing a play in Dublin and I went, ‘Oh..’
“Because I’d never really considered theatre and that was where I really started to go, ‘I love this and I actually don’t want to do anything else. I think this is what I should be doing. I want to get better at it and I want to learn how to be better at it and I want to do more of it’.
“So that was kind of where the idea of going off to train came from.
“Something in me was like, ‘No, I have to keep doing this’.
“I was just so lucky that I found the thing that I love doing so young because I know for some people, it takes longer.
“I was just doing it and I was like, ‘No, this is it for me actually’.”
Jermyn Street Theatre and Mint Theater present Wife to James Whelan by Teresa Deevy until 25 July.
For booking or more information, click here.