Irish Actress Eileen Walsh On Taking On Challenging Roles - The Gloss Magazine

Irish Actress Eileen Walsh On Taking On Challenging Roles

Leave it all on the stage …

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“I think the sharing of secrets happens in the dark,” says actor Eileen Walsh. “The amazing thing about theatre is you walk out on stage and the audience just believes you because they’re there to hear the story. We let ourselves believe.” Eileen has just returned to Ireland with her husband and two daughters, having lived in London for over 20 years. She has embarked on her biggest role to date since moving home, as Jocasta in The Boy: A Two-Play Theatrical Event at the Abbey Theatre. Part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, the run (until November 1) will see two plays, The Boy and The God and His Daughter, written by celebrated Irish playwright Marina Carr, performed concurrently. Audiences can see both plays back-to-back on certain nights, or view each play as a standalone story. “It is a challenge but it kind of makes sense. There’s no point half doing it,” says Eileen. “It’s a boldness that I don’t think we’ve seen from the Abbey before and it will be epic for the audience.”

Directed by the Abbey Theatre’s artistic director Caitríona McLaughlin, the plays offer a radical, contemporary Irish interpretation of the Greek myths of Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy, centring on the stories of Oedipus and Antigone. Carr’s are weighty plays – while punctured with black humour, they can be challenging, layered stories freighted with intricately woven historical references. “I think I’m very lucky in that it’s a passion of mine too, being able to carry a history or a past and make it relevant to the story that we’re telling now, which is a huge thing in Marina’s work. Marina does this thing of being so Greek and big – but yet it’s happening between just two people on a very intimate level,” explains Eileen. “I’ve always been drawn to powerful, secretive, lonely, frightened [characters] – all those big scary emotions have always drawn me in – and I feel a huge freedom in being able to play them.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m able to box things away in my real life so when it comes to being on stage I’m not afraid of opening up and giving and scaring or loving.”

It’s not Eileen’s first time taking the lead in one of Carr’s works – “anything that woman writes I’d jump at the chance to do” – she played Clytemnestra in Girl on an Altar at the Abbey in 2023, which explored the effects of war on women and children as well as themes of marital power dynamics and the role of women. While the retelling of Greek tragedies is a recurring element in Carr’s work, there are also subtle references to Ireland’s own history – another common thread that links this writer and actor. Some of Eileen’s standout roles have explored the harrowing stories of 20th-century Catholic Ireland, the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. One of Walsh’s first film roles was in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters in 2002. She played the role of Ann Lovett’s mother in the 2022 film Ann, alongside Zara Devlin (who will feature in The Boy). She played the wife (also called Eileen) of Cillian Murphy’s Bill Furlong in Small Things Like These, an adaption of Claire Keegan’s novella. At one point in the film, Eileen says to her husband upon hearing about his moral dilemma after discovering a distressed young girl in a Magdalene Laundry in town: “if you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.” Eileen explains, “the idea of those Tuam babies being left undiscovered for so long, there’s so much of that hinted at in The Boy, these historical problems that boil up and have to be dealt with.”

In The Boy, there’s a family that’s dealing with all of its past history. They have known it but blocked it from their own reality – yet it can only wait so long before the gods decide it’s time to deal with it. Eileen will star opposite Frank Blake, who plays the role of Oedipus. We all know the story of Oedipus, but Carr’s work reminds us that its tropes endure. “This is a story that’s thousands of years old but it’s reflecting ourselves back to us all the time,” says Eileen. “My girls will always talk about “Boy Mums” and how different they are. They say, ‘They love their sons way more than you love us!’ It’s interesting to see that Boy Mum thing played out, it still lives on – and Marina just takes it and turns it up to eleven. Here you have a Boy Mum who loves her son a lot, a lot, a lot. I just love the boldness of it.”

A return to Ireland, to the Abbey, to Marina Carr’s work – it feels like Eileen has found her feet at home. “It seemed like the right time to come back. It was kind of the perfect moment, everything just collided for everyone to be ready to do a move. My daughters are 19 and 16 – it’s no joke to expect them to move away from London just when they’re at an age to enjoy the city, but they adore it here. I do miss London, but as actors we can live anywhere because our work is everywhere.”

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