Cork actor: I love acting life... but a field of red seats awaiting is slightly terrifying

DOUGLAS-REARED actor, Darragh Shannon, who’s in the Abbey Theatre’s production of Tartuffe that’s coming to Cork Opera House, says that since studying drama, he has fallen on his feet.

The 29-year old may only have a small part as an officer in Frank McGuinness’s contemporary re-telling of Moliere’s 17th century French classic but his setpiece moment at the end of the production has been garnering laughs from the audience, ending the show on a high.

The play is a dramatic comedy about a hypocrite and fraud that inveigles his way into a family’s heart and home. McGuinness’s adaptation reflects the age in which we live. The costumes are more haute couture than baroque. As Darragh says, think Met Ball crossed with period drama costumes. The pop-influenced soundtrack includes Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys.

While the original play deals with two-faced religious piety, its new take skewers the hypocrisy and virtue signalling of our age. The villainous Tartuffe infiltrates a well-heeled family to try and lay claim to its wealth – and in the process, almost tears them apart.

Darragh says that treading the boards of the national theatre “is an overwhelming feeling. I always consider the Abbey to be the Carnegie Hall of my dreams. To see a field of red seats awaiting you is slightly terrifying as well.”

He says that Frank McGuinness has succeeded in “applying modernism to the verse in which the play is written. It’s also packed with one-liners.

“At its deep heart’s core, it’s a farce. The characters are heightened. You can feel sorry for them and you’re allowed to laugh in the space of a beat.”

Darragh, a past pupil of Rochestown College, was encouraged by his mother to try acting.

“Subconsciously, I had this thing that my mother couldn’t explain. It was this energy that would come out at the dinner table where I would create characters or would be imitating someone I’d spoken to during the day. 

"I wasn’t consciously wanting to act. It was a natural impulse. My mother picked up on it.”

However, he says his anxiety “hit the roof” when his mother said he should try out acting.

“Of course, that wasn’t the cool thing to do at the time in the late ’90s. I was football mad. But in the same breath, I’d be at the mirror in my room practising different characters. It was a fun pastime.”

When Darragh was 15, he joined a stage school.

“That was life-changing. I ended my soccer career because of a dislocated knee and a friend recommended that I go to the Declan Wolfe Stage School. He could see the same thing in me that my mother did. I thought it might be fun so I checked it out.”

It was the perfect fit for the teenager. Darragh says his mother has always encouraged her son’s acting career.

“It’s amazing because I’m kind of living her dream. She grew up in the small village of Aherla and wanted to be an actress at a very young age. But back then, you had only a few choices to make, and most of them were realistic.”

Through Declan Wolfe’s stage school, Darragh got to star in pantomimes.

“The first time I was on the Everyman stage and felt the lights on me, I was transfixed. It was my drug. I was fascinated by how I could be someone else, taking on their guise.”

At 18, after he had done his Leaving Cert, Darragh lost his father and says he didn’t really know what he wanted from life.

“A career in acting was at the back of my mind. I decided to go to Kinsale College to study drama. It’s a fantastic college with a wooden amphitheatre that’s a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe in London. It was one of the most liberating times of my life. It opened up the gateway of possibilities, expressing myself and growing my confidence.”

Darragh reckons his father would have been proud of his decision.

“My father was a very artistic man, very funny, a Jim Carrey-like fellow. I think, subconsciously, that’s probably why I wanted to mimic people. My father was like an impromptu comedian when people visited the house.”

Although Darragh didn’t know much about the Lir Academy in Dublin, a friend encouraged him to apply to it.

“I did the audition, not thinking much about it. It was a very intense process to get into the academy. I fell on my feet. I’m very lucky. Things have happened seamlessly in my life in the sense of going from one stage to another but not being too aware of what I was getting into.”

Darragh graduated from the Lir Academy with first class honours in acting. He is now a fully fledged freelance actor.

“I love it and wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s very easy for me to say I love my life right now and there is work involved. The opposite of that can be so difficult and upsetting. You’re made to feel like a failure because you don’t know where the next job is.”

But Darragh is a happy camper. He is in one episode of the RTÉ series, Sisters, playing a guitar-playing singer called Donal who has a one night stand with Sare.

“There are a few other things I’m waiting to hear back about. I can’t talk about them.”

He adds that it has been a while since he had to work part-time at a job to supplement acting.

“It’s almost inevitable that I’ll have to work part time at something. I tend to pick creative jobs like making cocktails,” says Darragh.

Tartuffe is at Cork Opera House from May 9-13.