Tommy Tiernan

On his ongoing acting journey

’Tis hard to come across good advice for the acting these days. One tip I picked up recently was: never, under any circumstances, move your eyebrows. Good advice for life, that, never mind performing. It’s what makes Charles Bronson in

Hard Times, and Botox Betty on the telly, such compelling figures

— you’re drawn towards the motionlessness of their faces. The water’s not moving, but you can see the fish swimming below.

So, given the dearth of a wholesome acting philosophy, I’ve had to formulate my own. Acting is the impersonation of someone who doesn’t exist. So you can’t really get it wrong. Anyway, the pressure on individuals to shine in a team endeavour is perverse.

We’re under the spell at the minute of the cult of individual brilliance, and it is a perversity. It’s a corporatesponsored epidemic in sport. These Man Of The Match awards are a travesty of the group ethic, and you can see it in the embarrassment of the players, as they are subjected to the shennanigans of having to accept them.

“Galway won the All Ireland hurling final!”

“And who was Man Of The Match?”

“You’re not listening to me, man, Galway won the All Ireland... ” The same should go for a play. “Daniel Day-Lewis is in King Lear at the moment.” “Is he any good?” “I don’t know about that, but you should see what happens to the poor man at the end.”

An actor’s job in a play is not to get in the way of the story, and there are some great stories out there.

The Crucible. Anything there of the witch hunt that we’d do well to heed? Perhaps we should take the Pope to see Waiting For Godot. Any thoughts, Your Eminence? I think he’d like it. He seems up for a laugh — and sure wouldn’t it take a big believer to be easy with an existential joke?

There’s a long list of plays I’d like to see. The Power Of Darkness by John McGahern. We should have a ceremony of it, of sitting in the theatre together and partaking. There is no fourth wall; we are in the story too. The molecules of it vibrating off the stage and mingling into us. In a way that film can’t. In the way that film can be a private thing, theatre is a public one.

A performance doesn’t exist without an audience. As a community of people, we gather together in the warmth of one another, for storytime. The Mass of it, the sacrilegious seriousness of it. Who are we? What’s happening to us? Do we care enough to take stock? Are we too fevered by our individualism to be able to drop the day out of our hands and heads and listen? Together.

Professional players are needed; storytellers need time to do the imagining. Any state with an interest in itself needs to support the arts, but another mark of a play’s importance to the tribe is if it makes it on to the amateur dramatic circuit. Like a folk song, it’s only when the people sing it that it’s living.

Theatre is the Abbey and the Gate and Druid, but it is also the Corofin Dramatic Society doing

The Cripple Of Inishmaan and the Nenagh Players doing Ariel. Not something that can happen with film…

“How are ya Tom, would you come down to Bunclody? We’re filming Dunkirk on the beach with iPhones and fourteen-hundred mannequins we got from a lad in Japan. We did Batman last year with a fella from the psychiatric. I can forward you the link if you want...”

Death of a Salesman to be played out live in the room for every kid in the country before they enter the world of work. The lesson of it? Well, if I could sum that up, there’d be little point in sitting through it. Suffice to say that it asks questions of us. Questions about effort and loneliness. Questions about sacrifice and ordinariness. And the asking of the question presents the possibility of healing, and the prevention of further damage.

Not that it all has to be serious. There’s laughs to be had as well. There a few things that heal, as well as a great dose of giggles in a great room full of gigglers. Do you remember how lifted you were the first time you saw D’Unbelievables?

I’m in Sive at the moment, at the Gaiety. Am I any good? You’re missing the point, man; you should see what they do to the poor girl…

It’s about us.

“There’s no fourth wall. We are in the story”