Citizen O'Kane

Tony Clayton-Lea speaks to the accidental Irish comic and actress Deirdre O'Kane about her struggle for success.

Heard the one about the successful Irish comic who never, ever wanted to tell gags for a living, who never wanted to be recognised? "The recognition factor is something I'm aware of now, but it's not a pain in the neck," says Deirdre O'Kane, perched on a sofa in a Dublin hotel having made her way through the bar, foyer and tearoom, leaving a trail of glances behind her. The transition, O'Kane explains, from little known actress/comic to very well-known actress/comic is astonishing. On a nuts'n'bolts level, her income is better and she's so much busier. On a creative level, too, O'Kane reckons that she's pushing boundaries she has hardly pressed before.

"To be an act on a bill is one thing-people are buying a ticket to see a show and whatever they get is luck, basically. But when people buy a ticket just for one name, it's a luxury, and I'm very grateful for it. It's such a hard thing to cross over, but it's a nicer pressure, too, in that people who buy a ticket for your show are kind of on your side already - they know you from something. You know when you walk on stage that you're going to get a warm welcome. I'd need to really mess up to spoil that, so it's up to me to deliver from that point onwards."

Now in her mid-30s, O'Kane was raised in Co. Louth. Acting (and not comedy "I never wanted to be a comic," she insists) came into her life whilst she was boarding in Rathfarnham's Loreto Abbey. "I had no intention of doing anything else," Deirdre confirms. "I was never very driven, and never really pushed myself to any great degree, but that could be because I was quite focused on acting. Lazy? Maybe. Things that came easy to me I did well in."

While she was biding her time in Dublin's College of Marketing she saw a newspaper advertisement for a course at the Gaiety School of Acting, which she applied for. A walk-on part in a production of 'The Borstal Boy' ensued, wherein she delivered her first professional line: "Cor, look at the loonies." Hollywood, unsurprisingly, did not come aknocking, and for the next considerable part of Deirdre's life, she struggled as much to make ends meet as she did to find her niche in an overcrowded, under funded marketplace.

Government schemes in provincial theatre companies alternated with long periods of unemployment; many auditions were undertaken for parts Deirdre never got, and for months at a time she was carried along on a false sense of expectation, euphoria and optimism. Following an eight-month period of being unemployed and broke ("I was really low and thought I was jinxed - I wasn't getting anywhere") she and another jobbing actress finally took matters into their hands and put on a small show in a tiny theatre space. Lo and behold, this was the start of O'Kane's rise and the fulcrum for her future development.

Steady roles in mainstream theatre followed, and although it was better than scurrying around looking for work, she gradually began to realise the parts she undertook were not suitable for her. "The whole notion of being a jobbing actor is that you're meant to be grateful working," she states. "You're never meant to query the work itself. Which is fair enough - maybe-but I began to audition for things I really thought I wasn't right for. So it was lack of choice that was getting to me."

Another career doubt came in the mid-1990s, when she was asked to cast the Irish movie, 'I Went Down'. It was an experience that changed her life in relation to career options: "I was now on the other side of the fence, auditioning actors - and I suddenly thought that as an actor I was in such a lowly position. You have no power unless you are a name, and it's only when you see how actors are talked about that you think so seriously about it.

And it's nothing to do with the person - you're just looking for something very specific for the role. It's harsh, because you're wrong for the role for no particular reason. That was a definite eye opener - that and Julia Roberts getting the part of Kitty Kiernan in 'Michael Collins'! I actually said to someone before the movie was cast that if she got the role of Kitty then there wasn't hope for any Irish actress to do anything. But that's the business we're in and you've got to wake up to the fact."

O'Kane is an acute critic of her writing and work (she only throws in a cheap gag when she feels she has to save her show from death by hen party), which she likes to think stems from some kind of artistic integrity - "I hate saying that because it sounds woeful," she says. Yet O'Kane has a point about cheap laughs. Talking about the club scene that aspiring comics have to cut their teeth in, she says she loathes mainstream comedy because of the Lowest Common Denominator factor.

The club scene, she maintains, is largely conveyor belt comedy that by its very nature encourages comics to dilute their work for the sake of an easy laugh. Late night gigs are not so much about the art of the comic as how much money the bar rakes in at the end of the night. Comedy-despite the clichés it's a funny game, an area of arts and entertainment that is much more difficult to impart than tragedy.

Despite some people at dinner parties who are disappointed with her obvious lack of spark or her reluctance to trot out an occasional stage routine, Deirdre O'Kane is a funny woman. She says she won't ever give up comedy because she's not prepared to let go of the control it gives her. "I know what it was like to be a jobbing actor, waiting for the phone to ring, and I can't go there again." She says she misses straight acting terribly, and you can sense that her considerable thespian talents might just regard her comedy roles in the way that writer Graham Greene considered some of his books as 'entertainments'.

Choices, she says, it's all about choices. She says no to work more than she says yes, which for someone who went through long periods of unemployment frightens her. "I get offered an awful lot of things I really wouldn't be interested in. I don't want to be a presenter of a panel or talk or travel or quiz show. If I did I'd be seriously working in the mainstream commercial area for years, but I really don't want that. "Choices are really important in all of this. I've been incredibly lucky with what I've done over the past several years. If I'm careful about the choices, I'll be fine." EM