How long is misterman

Violent, even. Writer Enda Walsh takes your Irish dinky pastoral and smashes it to bits. The smithereens mosaic into something altogether harder and harsher. In your face, Ballykissangel. He cues in the sounds and voices, corrects himself sometimes the tape corrects him. The show that Thomas is putting on is clearly a long time in rehearsal. We gradually understand that he will be rehearsing these scenes, which all relate to a single day, for a long time to come.

The debris filling the garage could be the jumble in his own head: areas like the cluster of crucifixes light up as though neural pathways have been activated. The film star jawline and head have sprouted hair — just those charged blue eyes laser right to the back of the stalls. His is a performance that burns with zeal. From Genesis we hurtle to Revelations, and from recording to avenging angel. We also had this great movement director, Michael Murphy, who studied at [Ecole Jacques] Le Coq theatre school in France, which is a very famous movement school.

There is no naturalism that needs to restrain us in the playing of those characters, particularly, so that was very liberating for me.

That was great, to take a normal person who maybe looks at him for too long, and he just distorts that into something mad. Or both? You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

So, no, I think at the core of this human being is a very wounded, sensitive, well-intentioned person, who, through all the different reasons, has found himself living like this. If you can tap into that, then you can begin to play him with some sort of honesty and fruitfulness. How did the two of you talk through Innisfree?

And every single person knows every other single person—and their family before. There are only four million people in the whole of Ireland, so you can imagine how there are some really, really sparsely populated parts of the country. But also very important is that Thomas has never, ever left.

That obviously must do something to your perspective. You said that Enda wrote the play 16 years ago, and it does seem like a play that exists out of time. Thomas is not talking on a cell phone or anything like that. Do you think that sort of town is kind of preserved in this earlier time? So I do think it still does exist.

We were very clear not to compromise the language, or the speed at which the characters talk to each other, or anything like that.