Tide brings Mahoney back to Galway

IF you ever thought you saw someone who looked just like Frasier’s father walking along the beach at Lahinch, it may actually have been the man himself.

John Mahoney is at the Galway Arts Festival this week, performing in The Outgoing Tide. He says while he loves Galway, he has frequently visited this county as well.
“I spent a lot of time in Clare too, before I started doing the festivals in Galway, I’d go to Ireland maybe every two years or so and I always stayed in Lahinch. Every-
body thought it was because I liked the golf but I don’t, I’ve never swung a golf club in my life. I just like the town, I like the location and I love the county, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Clare.”
He’s just celebrated his 72nd birthday but far from taking things easy, he’ll be on stage seven times in five days in Galway. The buzz of the stage is still something that thrills him. “It’s my profession, it just exhilarates me and it gives me energy when I think I’ve just about reached the end of my rope.”
Best known in this country for his role in Frasier, and to a lesser extent his part alongside Gabriel Byrne in In Treatment, he hasn’t fully finished with TV and movies. “Every once in a while, I’ll do a TV or movie role. I did a movie called Flipped about a year ago and I’ve been doing some episodes of Hot in Cleveland as Betty White’s boyfriend, so I have been going out to LA and doing a little TV but for the most part, I don’t particularly want to do that, I want to stick to the stage and if possible, stay at home. I basically lived out of a suitcase for 11 years, while I was doing Frasier and I just said to myself, ‘I’m 72 now, I think I can enjoy a few of the fruits of my labour, just stay home and take it easy’ and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
The Outgoing Tide is a play he enjoyed being involved with in the US. “We did it in Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago. It broke all the house records, it got a standing ovation every night, we couldn’t extend it because it’s a subscription house and they had to bring in the next play but it was a hugely popular, inspiring play that I’m really glad to get another chance to do.”
The play itself is a mixture of dark and light moments. “It’s a play about a man who has a lot of physical and mental problems that are getting worse and he’s trying to take care of his family after he dies. The things that he comes up with, that I don’t want to name specifically, are very repugnant to his family and it’s a battle between what he wants to do and whether they’re going to allow him to do it. The thing is there’s so much flashback in it, about earlier times and happier times and there’s a huge amount of humour in it. Even though it’s a serious subject and there are very dark moments in it, there are also very funny moments in it, it’s a very funny play.”
His own role as Gunner, a not entirely sympathetic character, is fairly challenging. “It’s a little tough playing a character that’s nothing like you. A few years ago, I did a play at Steppenwolf Theatre called I Never Sang For My Father. I hated that play but it was one of the biggest successes we ever had. People loved it but it was so hard to play because I hated the character, I couldn’t find anything about that man that I enjoyed playing. With Gunner, I don’t hate him by any means at all, he’s a very funny, gregarious, great guy but things are his way or the high way. And he’s not very good to his son, or at least he wasn’t during his son’s childhood although he tries to make up for it later. He’s a very sort of selfish, dogmatic person and it’s not an easy character to play. For a lovely person like me!”
Mahoney says he really enjoys performing in Galway and loves the Irish audience’s appreciation of theatre. He feels there’s a type of reverence for it here, that’s not often found in America.
“Galway and Chicago are my two favourite cities in the world. I’ve always loved Galway, even before I ever worked there. The first time I worked there was when I did Long Day’s Journey Into Night and it was just such a great experience. I remember going out for a drink afterwards with Tom Murphy and I remember saying, ‘My God, Tom; four and a half hours and I didn’t hear a candy wrapper, I didn’t hear a cough’. He said, ‘John, what they see up there, theatre, this is sacred to us in our country’. For someone to say what I do is sacred is an amazing feeling and I do get that feeling when I’m in Galway and it was the same at the Peacock too, those audiences are so intense and so there for you, every second. They never seem to drift off and I only heard one cell phone, which is pretty good. It’s very hard to get through a performance over here without cell phones going off anymore.”
Comedian Des Bishop says many Irish people don’t like to recognise celebrities because they take a perverse pleasure in bursting pretensions but that’s not something that Mahoney’s experienced.
He says people are always mentioning Frasier to him when he’s here. “Occasionally, someone will do a movie and say ‘I saw you in Say Anything’ or ‘I saw you in Moonstruck’. But for the most part, it’s Frasier. They’ll look for an entrée into a conversation maybe using the dog. They’ll say ‘Oh, where’s Eddie?’ and I hate to have to tell them that he died four or five years ago. People will actually yell on the street, ‘Hey Marty, how’re you doing? It’s really nice, I love it.”
He enjoys Irish drama and the ability of Irish playwrights to weld misery and humour together. “In any kind of Irish writing, whether it’s James Joyce or Enda Walsh, you have these moments of deep sorrow and angst and all of a sudden, you’re laughing out loud or you’re in the middle of a laugh and it turns into a sob.
“It’s so typical of Irish literature. This [The Outgoing Tide] is the same thing, I’m doing a play about a very serious, terrible, frightening subject but it’s so laced with humour. Of course, I play an Irish patriarch so maybe that’s something to do
with it.”
Mahoney had a strange route to the kind of success that has made him recognisable throughout the world. He was 37 years old when he committed to the stage but when he did, things went almost perfectly from the outset.
“I’ve had people look at my career and say I inspired them and they went and tried it. And nine times out of 10; they failed because what happened to me is so unusual. At 37 years old, deciding all of a sudden that you’re going to enter the most rocky profession in the world, where at any given time only 5% of union members have a job. But it was something I felt I had to do and I did and everything just sort of fell into place but it was highly unusual, to just be in the right play at the right time with the right person like John Malkovich, who then advised me to join his company and all of a sudden, I’m a novice actor at 37 and I’m never out of work, I have a job constantly.”
It’s been an amazing and glittering 35-year career since and when he spoke to The Clare Champion last week, he was already looking forward to performing at the Galway Arts Festival. “I’m still in Chicago at the moment, it’s boiling hot and I can’t wait to get on the plane on Thursday.”