Tom Vaughan- Lawlor told David Hennessy about acting opposite Brendan Gleeson in Conor McPherson’s The Weir.
Tom Vaughan- Lawlor is part of the cast for a star-studded production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir led by Brendan Gleeson and directed, for the first time, by the playwright himself.
Conor McPherson has long been regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest living playwrights.
It was The Weir that brought him to prominence when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1997 and went on to win the Olivier for Best New Play.
With a cast completed by Seán McGinley (That They May Face the Rising Sun), Owen McDonnell (Bad Sisters, Killing Eve) and Kate Phillips (Peaky Blinders, Wolf Hall), The Weir is currently playing Dublin’s Olympia before coming to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London for what will be Gleeson’s West End debut.
It also follows the premiere of McPherson’s new play The Brightening Air that also starred McGinley at the Old Vic.
Taking place on a stormy night, the story of The Weir sees four local men gather in an isolated pub in rural Ireland.
But their usual banter and everyday lives are disrupted by the arrival of a woman called Valerie.
The stories they weave to impress her are gripping, haunting and deeply unsettling.
Little do they know that she has a profoundly personal story of her own, the sharing of which will leave them all shaken.
The Weir deals with themes such as the need for human connection, the possibility of hope, and the enduring power of storytelling.
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor plays the role of Finbar.
Vaughan- Lawlor is well known to Irish audiences for playing gangster Nidge in Love/Hate.
His other roles include playing PJ Mara in Aidan Gillen’s Charlie Haughey study, playing Padraig Pearse in Trial of the Century and playing Republican Larry Marley in the true life prison escape drama Maze.
More recently he has played IRA men in Baltimore and Say Nothing.
He has also appeared in Peaky Blinders, Bryan Cranston’s The Infiltrator, ITV’s reimagining of The Ipcress File and, perhaps bigger than any of these, as Ebony Maw in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
However, it was on the stage that Tom first learned his craft.
He was actually appearing in This Lime Tree Bower by Conor McPherson at The Young Vic back in 2005. It has taken 20 years for him to get to appear in another of his plays but it appears to have been worth the wait.
He chatted to The Irish World when the show was in rehearsals in Dublin.
How have rehearsals been going?
“It’s been wonderful.
“I’ve been in one of Conor’s plays before, but I’ve read all his plays and I’ve seen many of his plays, but I’d never met him.
“I had heard amazing things about him as an artist and as a director so being in the room with him is amazing because he’s treating the play as if it’s a play he’s still working on and still tinkering with and changing and evolving.
“I feel very lucky and honoured to be there witnessing him tinker with a masterpiece, it’s been great.
“The cast are amazing.
“Brendan’s incredible, and Kate and Owen and Seán.
“We all get on very well.
“Casts say that but we do and I think that also comes from Conor because he sets the tone, he and Brendan.
“Brendan’s very generous and very warm and for a man who’s kind of done it all, he’s incredibly humble.
“It sounds naff to say but I run into work every day and when the days are over, I can’t believe they’re over because they go so fast.
“It’s been wonderful.”
Sounds like a joyful rehearsal period, is the play sombre to be working on though?
“It’s a very funny play.
“There’s great weight to it but I think Conor has that brilliant counterpoint a lot of great dramatists do where they can kind of balance great comedy with great drama and tragedy and I think having those two and playing those two is really amazing and he’s brilliant at that.
“It’s very funny.
“It’s nostalgic and once you don’t get lost in nostalgia, I find it’s very satisfying and what’s great about it is as well is the play was written and set in the 90s but other than one or two references, it feels very current and it feels very present day and relevant.
“And that’s what great plays do.
“They are for all time because they touch on the deepest themes in our lives and our existence.
“And that’s what his work does so it’s rigorous and hard but it’s also very funny.”
Is the beauty of the play or the very Irishness of the play the fact that it is all about storytelling. It’s set in a pub of all places and it is all about these guys swapping stories really, isn’t it?
“Yeah, I think it’s that amazing thing about Irish people and wanting to hear chat and wanting to hear news and wanting to hear stories.
“I would say sometimes to my English friends, ‘Any news?’
“And they would go, ‘What do you mean?’
“And I go, ‘You know, any news?’
“And they’re like, ‘What? Like world news?’
“And I’m like, ‘No, just news, stories, chat, gossip, stuff that’s going on’.
“I just think it’s a very Irish thing to kind of share news, share gossip, share stories and even stories you’ve told ten times, just tell it again because there’ll always be a spin on it and there’ll always be new information and new colours put in.
“And also it’s pubs in Ireland being a very communal space and that being very relevant to the Irish community in Britain which I find very moving because historically it’s been a place of belonging and a place of community and reference points to home.
“I’ve lived in England 25 years and I still miss a certain degree of- Well, not a certain degree, an absolute degree- Of Irish humour and Irish sensibility and Irish chat and irreverence.”
You say you did one of Conor’s plays before. That was This Lime Tree Bower at The Young Vic in 2005 so 20 years ago now..
“It’s very interesting about his plays because they’re so well written.
“They feel very comfortable in your body and the words feel very comfortable in your mouth.
“He’s got an amazing ear for dialogue and for language that really sits in the Irish dialect.
“It was a very similar experience doing This Lime Tree Bower.
“What’s kind of extraordinary about his plays is that in many ways, they’re incredibly straightforward and at the same time, they’re incredibly sophisticated.
“The accessibility is part of the brilliance, I think.
“You’re brought into the story through humour and chat and the moments of everyday life or little things that are every day but also have significance and are recognisable and are just kind of fun to observe but also are kind of linked into something more existential and more humane.
“To come back to his work is really special.”
You’ve seen some of Conor’s plays before but thankfully not The Weir so you don’t have another actor’s Finbar in your mind..
“Absolutely.
“You’ve got to try and make sure you’re finding your own impetus, your own choices and you can justify them and follow your own kind of inspiration.
“It sounds cheesy but it’s a play and it’s about ‘play’. It’s about interaction and it’s about reaching other people on stage and then that going out into the audience.
“He (Conor) really encourages that which is generous and also speaks to his kind of security as an artist because he could very easily go, ‘This is a great play. We’re not going to tinker with it. Let’s just do what’s there’.
“But he’s continually changing bits, adding bits and tinkering so it’s really amazing.
“It feels like a new play to me.”
That’s amazing because it’s a well known masterpiece..
“Well, I think a writer who was less secure or less curious or less of an artist maybe would want to.
“But I did Philadelphia, Here I Come and Friel, when we did that, was tinkering with that as well, changing bits and adding bits and cutting.
“It was like an older writer looking back on a younger writer’s work and changing bits here and there.
“It’s kind of amazing being with a writer where Conor is in his career and in his life, I suppose.
“I just hope we can do it justice.
“That’s the responsibility we have as a cast and Conor has as a director, is doing justice to the play that Conor McPherson, the writer, wrote.
“Our job is to live up to that and that’s where the graft is, in finding that.”
You mentioned Friel and a commonality McPherson has with him, are they similar as writers in that there is something other worldly about both of their work?
“Absolutely, I think all great writers have one foot in the domestic or the everyday and then they’ve got their other foot in the cosmic, in the universal, in the heavenly, in the mythic, in the kind of epic.
“That’s where you want to be as an actor is working on that material that kind of spins both.
“I’ve been very fortunate in the work I’ve done but the playwrights I’ve worked with, including Friel, Mark O’Rowe, Conor McPherson, who’ve been in the room: Very gentle, humane men but also ferocious with their rigor, ferocious with their pursuit of the truth, ferocious with standards.
“And that’s why it’s exciting because they’re like, ‘Look, this is a great play and we’ve got to justify putting it on again’.
“There’s no point in us just going, ‘Well, we’re just putting on The Weir. We’ll just knock out an old classic and people will come’.
“That’s not good enough.
“We have to be honest and we have to deliver it up every night for a new audience, and we have to justify this as a revival.
“That’s our job as a cast and Conor’s job as a director, but that’s where you want to be.
“Even though that can be frightening, that’s where you want to be.”
Tell us about the role of Finbar..
“Well, he’s a very interesting character because in one way Valerie is an outsider coming into the area but Finbar is also slightly an outsider as well.
“He’s now kind of migrated to the city and he’s more of a townie now than a country boy so he’s coming into the bar also as a bit of an outcast but he’s cast out himself.
“He’s come out here to show Valerie off and to show himself off to the men around her.
“But there’s a lot of levels as to why he’s there and what he’s doing there for himself emotionally and that’s very exciting to kind of examine because on one level, it seems quite simple as to why he’s there but on other levels, I think it’s very complicated as to why he’s there.”
Is a big thing in the story that everyone has their story and you never know what someone else’s story is?
“Exactly and it’s like that thing of when we hear people tell stories we’ve heard a million times, sometimes there’s a new spin on it or sometimes there’s a new emphasis or sometimes there’s a bit they’ve left out or a new addition you hadn’t heard before and then also, in the passage of time, a new perspective.
“So even though the bones of a story might be the same but the dressing around it or the way it’s delivered can change, and that’s true of performing as well, that it should be a bit different every night because it’s a different experience for you every night and it’s a different experience for the audience every night and you don’t want it to become mundane and you don’t want it to become every day.
“You want it to become unique and singular for each audience every night and that’s a challenge to the actor but it’s a good challenge and it’s a challenge that as an actor, you’ve got to try and embrace and live up to because that’s your job.
“But when you’re working with great material and with great actors, you feel like your job is to uphold your end of the bargain.”
Is there a lot of reading between the lines and what’s not said that is important also?
“The stories are having an effect on the people who are listening but they also have this incredible internal, subtextual effect on the teller and it’s taking them back to places they remembered and taking them back to places they were themselves in the recall of the story.
“They’re going back to a place in their own heads and their own histories.
“For Finbar, that’s very much the case of something that happened to him.
“Those stories are being told to an audience in the bar but they’re also having this huge impact on the teller because they’re going through a certain degree of in some cases trauma, in some cases great fear, love and so as an actor, you’ve got to make sure you’re kind of playing all the levels without making it obvious you’re playing all the levels and that’s where the hard work comes in making sure you are there emotionally, you’re there technically.”
Of course you have worked with Brendan before all the way back on (2006 film) The Tiger’s Tail.
“Yes, that’s right.
“That was the first time I met him and again, he was very kind to me and very welcoming because it was my first ever screen role and I was really nervous.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing but Brendan was really welcoming and really, really generous to me so I felt very calm and so coming back to work with him again, it’s been a lovely full circle kind of thing, or part of a circle anyway. It’s great.”
Seán McGinley was in that John Boorman film too but it was on Love/Hate that you and he got acquainted..
“Yes and it’s so funny because great actors change and they disappear.
“In my head Seán, as a colleague, was a man who was terrifying to me because of what he was personifying in Love/Hate.
“But in this play, he’s playing another different part of himself, another totally different colour of tenderness and humanity and sensitivity that I didn’t see doing Love/Hate because that’s what he wasn’t but now you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s why he’s such an incredible actor’.
“And so again, it’s just an honour, a real honour.”
You mentioned the importance of Irish pubs here in the UK. You worked many different jobs in London while training at RADA to be an actor, I bet some bar work was in there..
“Yeah, everything.
“Been in bars, lots of waiting tables, the archetypal Paddy on the construction site, but meeting amazing people and also just that thing of coming to London and grafting.
“Look, I had it totally easy in comparison to thousands and thousands and thousands of Irish people who moved to London.
“I was on easy street but London’s a tough town and you’ve got to make sure you’re keeping your head above the water and that grafting really stands to you if you have that temperament and if you are instilled with it by your parents, to graft.
“I feel proud to be part of a story of Irish people going to England and working hard and giving as good as you get and trying to endeavour to find your place.
“It feels very emotional to me to be part of that story and I’m very proud to be an Irish person, an Irishman in the UK.”
The Weir is at Dublin’s Olympia until 6 September before coming to Harold Pinter Theatre, London 12 September – 6 December 2025.
For more information or to book, click here.
