Brian Friel himself cast Catherine Byrne as Chrissy in Dancing at Lughnasa after watching an Abbey Theatre dress rehearsal of his Aristocrats in which Byrne played clare. She talked of that moment during a pause in rehearsal for Molly Sweeney in which she plays the title role.
“He didn’t know me,” Catherine Byrne recalls, “and when I heard he was coming I thought, what’s he going to think? Because I’m not very aristocratic. But he was in Dublin casting Dancing at Lughnasa with the director Patrick Mason. I knew Patrick because he has been my teacher in the Abbey School and he had been very helpful to me and knew my work.
“Brian came in and he must have liked something because the next day I was cast as Chrissy in Dancing at Lughnasa. We got on immediately though I must say I was a bit frightened of him at the beginning. He didn’t talk much. But he was lovely to work with, and of course the play, the play! I loved it. It was the first new play I had ever done. All the other wonderful characters I had played, like Nora, in The Plough and the Stars, had been done years before by other people. But Chrissy was just on the page. Brian said to me, `She’ yours!’ So indeed Chrissy was hers.
Catherine Byrne took her from the stage at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin to the West End in London. Then, after an utterly unique performance in the school-house in Glenties, Co. Donegal – the inspiration for Ballybeg where towns-people still remembered Friel’s aunts transformed now into the five Mundy sisters of the play, Lughnasa came to Broadway, where audiences sat transfixed and then stood to cheer the women who critic John Simon called “five of the finest women actresses I have met in many years as a drama critic, film critic and lover of women.” The theater world concurred and Dancing at Lughnasa received the Tony for best play.
“The spirit of the Mundys is indomitable,” Simon wrote in Irish America, best expressed in Chrissy’s unquenchable thirst for life. Chrissy is the one sister who had ventured out into the world beyond Ballybeg and returned with her son Michael, who narrates the play. The role combined a tough practically with a belief in the romantic that would require an actress with a special quality. And while Catherine Byrne would laugh off any such grand comparisons she herself naturally has those contradicting qualities. She can wrap herself in the part of an aristocrat as she did playing a Russian noblewomen in Friel’s translation of A Month in the Country, but now, quickly skating over her distinguished career and laughing at her great fortune, she resembles her own son Jack, 14, with all the movement and energy.
Byrne credits Joe Dowling and Patrick Mason, both artistic directors of the Abbey, with guiding her from bit parts into the major roles she now plays, and she talks a lot about good fortune. And yet for years she struggled with a dyslexia that made reading scripts a slow, arduous process. When she was in school the concept “learning disability” was not as widely accepted as now. “I had a terrible time academically,” she says. She left school early and worked as a designer of window display in Dublin.
But there had always been another dimension to growing-up time in Dublin. Her father, Eddie Bryne, was a very successful actor on stage and in films. “But he wasn’t a movie star,” Catherine Byrne explains. “Kids at school would ask is he a movie star? Well, no, he wasn’t. Now my two boys have loads of friends whose parents are actors but when I was a child no one else I knew had a father who was an actor. He didn’t work in Ireland. He worked in England. I never saw him in anything. He used to go away to work. That was it. `Dad’s away at work.’ Since I wasn’t doing well at school and because of my father people would say to me, `I suppose you will be an actress.’ Well, I didn’t like that. It was like you’re stupid so you’ll be an actress. It’s not like that now but then …
“You see, my father didn’t come into acting through any of the traditional ways. He and his sister owned a vegetable shop on Baggot Street. When he was 28 he went to see amateur dramatics performance and fell in love with the lead actress, my mother Kitty Thuillier. He joined the group. They married and then, as was the way in those days, she stayed home with us, my brothers Mike and Frank, my sister Susan and me, while he went on to a professional acting career, though she did do radio parts. He played baddies, wearing a slough hat and trenchcoat, smoking, with a gravelly voice. He had hooded eyes, I supposedly have his eyes. He went away for a year and a month when I was six – which is a long time for your father to be away when you’re a child. He was doing Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando. He had a nice part Johnny Ferrar. He died six seeks after Jack, my eldest was born, but that’s how the boys know him from that film because we can rent the tape now and watch it at home.”
But it was because of her mother that Catherine Byrne was accepted into the Acting School of the Abbey Theatre. “I really went asking if I could study stage design,” she remembers. “But the school was for acting and you had to audition to be accepted. My mother taught me three pieces in the kitchen. Two were Rosie Redmond from The Plough and the Stars and Maurya from Riders to the Sea. I just copied my mother’s performances. My father always said she was much better than he was. It was the times – she never got her chance. Still, she was a happy mother. But that got me into the Abbey.”
For six years Byrne toured as an assistant stage manager until director/actor Patrick Bedford saw that special quality and gave her her first big part as Diane in Ring Around the Moon. During this time she met actor John Olahon. “He was playing a child with a bowl hair cut and freckles. I thought he was a 15-year-old playing 12. Then I saw him come into the the pub after the play. `What’s he doing here?’ I asked my friend. Well, he was thirty!” They were friends for five years before becoming romantically involved while playing opposite each other in As You Like It.
This summer they played together in John B. Keane’s Sharon’s Grave with sons Jack, 14, and Max 11, in attendance. John Olahon plays at both the Abbey and the Gate Theatre and is a regular on the Irish series Glenroe on public television stations. But the family will be together for Christmas in New York as Catherine Byrne prepares for the January 7 opening of Molly Sweeney.
After playing Clare, Chrissy, and Angela in Wonderful Tennessee, how does Catherine Byrne see this latest of what she describes as “Brian’s great women”?
“Molly Sweeney starts the play as a very strong woman. She’s blind but a great athlete and a highly successful physical therapist and swimmer but she has never had a relationship with a man. The great figure in her life was her father who directed all his love on this little blind girl. At 40 she falls in love and marries a man she had known a month. Curing her blindness becomes his obsession. He brings her to this famous Dr. Rice played by Jason Robards who has gone to live in Donegal. He operates and … but I won’t tell you too much. Only that in the same way as Brian’s other women, as she opens herself she becomes both more fragile and stronger.”
As Catherine Byrne quickly sketches Molly Sweeney’s life she almost unconsciously brought her into the office where we sat. She closed her eyes and felt for the flowers that become a touchstone in the play. With no make-up and wearing Jack’s sweatshirt she made me see Molly Sweeney for a minute. I could well imagine that dress rehearsal when Brian Friel had seen that Catherine Byrne could take his women off the page and make them hers.
Friel is also directing Molly Sweeney – first for him. Catherine Byrne spoke of the “great generosity and support” of his directing technique. “Of course we have the text – those beautiful, beautiful words!” When President Bill Clinton was in Derry he talked about Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come, with the warmth and understanding of someone who really knew the play. Who knows, maybe one night he and Hillary Clinton will be in the audience at the Roundabout Theatre. If they are, Catherine Byrne will make sure they never forget Molly Sweeney.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the January/February 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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