The Arts Actor at an interesting stage in life

Between the devil and the deep blue sea: Ingrid Craigie (above). 'I don't think I've ever thought of not being an actor'.
Photograph: Bryan OBrien

Ingrid Craigie didn't come from a theatre family, but, 30 years into her career, she has no regrets, and remains refreshingly unaffected by the trappings of showbiz

ON FIRST IMPRESSIONS, actress Ingrid Craigie appears china-doll fragile. Her skin is porcelain pale, her face fine-boned and delicate, and her light green eyes are almost translucent, like they might be made of glass. She is so thin that she looks like she would easily break, but Craigie displays a steely sense of character during our fleeting meeting that belies her physical vulnerability.

Craigie is a private person and is determined that this interview will be no tabloid exposé - "though theatre actors are usually lucky in that way," she says, "such attention is normally reserved for the big- and small-screen celebrities." Even so, she makes it clear that she is more interested in "promoting the work" than in personal revelation and it would be impolite - an insult to her poise, her prudence and her sheer professionalism - to probe further, so I don't. Besides, Craigie's impressive body of work over the last 30 years gives ample enough scope for an in-depth and intelligent discussion of theatre, film, art, and friendship, if not for a dissection of her life.

Craigie arrives exactly on time, and is exhausted but exhilarated after rehearsals and the first full run-through of The Deep Blue Sea, which opens on Tuesday at The Gate. Craigie plays the lead role in Terence Rattigan's "unfairly forgotten, intensely human drama." The love-tortured Hester Collier is disturbed in the middle of a suicide attempt as the play opens. A married woman who has left her husband for a younger lover, Hester is "torn between sexual love and stability, but she cannot even give herself the type of love that she needs".

As Craigie explains, Hester's internal conflict - and the crises that besiege the other characters in the play - "reflects an important, understated aspect of the human condition: our personal quest to understand what the point of life is. Hester does not find any answers, but she realises in the end that by living life we add a little spark to it, and, as one of the other characters, Mr Miller, says: the world is so dark a place that even a small flicker is enough to give us a little bit of light."

In a perceptive reading of the play, Craigie argues that Rattigan's play is also deeply reflective of the social culture of post-war Britain. "This was a very censorious time," she says, "and by leaving her husband, Hester has put herself outside society. It's important to get that across to people, because we don't have stigma attached to things like that any more. But the sense of isolation that accompanied personal choices at the time is very frightening. Hester is completely ostracised, and the play is really about outsiders in society, people who live outside the norm."

Craigie also draws attention to how ironic the fate of the writer is in this context: "The play was drawn from Rattigan's own personal experience with a lover, but it is also reflective of his own reputation as a playwright. He was very popular in the 1940s, but then suddenly, after the war, he fell out of favour. With every kind of revolution people tend to obliterate what happened just before, and so the appetite for his well-made plays about middle-class people dissolved. His plays were dismissed as old-fashioned and snobbish, but really they are about what is not said in society, and what lies underneath the lines is just as important as what the characters say."

PERHAPS IT IS a stretch to place Craigie's own coming-of-age against such censorious times, but there are inflections of a similar, if far more minor, "recklessness" - a willingness to buck against the trend - in Craigie's decision to pursue a career on the stage. Her initial interest in the theatre was sparked by her drama teacher at Alexandra College, "who just told me one day that I could be an actor. It was an odd thing - how do you know you can be an actor? But when she said that, I decided 'right, that's what I'm going to do'. My mother did not think that it was a good idea. It wasn't in our family - a lot of actors come from families of actors; it was what you did, the family profession. But my father was in the army, and at that time there were no women in the army so I couldn't very well follow him into that. So instead I went to Trinity to read English, but with the purpose of becoming an actor."

She continues: "I joined Players, and I had my own theatre company with friends, doing plays by modern writers: Howard Brenton, David Hare, Harold Pinter. At that time Joe Dowling, and other professional producers, would come to see our productions, and that was very encouraging. But my big break came when Michael Colgan, who had been at Trinity but was working at the Abbey then, asked me if I wanted to be an extra in The Vicar of Wakefield, so I started doing walk-ons. They invited me to join the company soon afterwards, directly out of college."

"That sort of softened the blow for my parents, because I was working professionally straight after university. But they were right to be concerned. The work is exhausting: learning lines and rehearsing all day, and then working at night. And you don't get paid very well: when you think about it, if I'd been 30 years working as a lawyer or a doctor, how much I would be earning. But it is getting the opportunity to work that is the hardest challenges for an actor. You never know when the next job is going to come - I don't know what I'm doing as an actor after May - and you have to have a toughness to deal with that; not being able to control your own career. I've been lucky - I've worked pretty much constantly for the last 30 years - but that doesn't mean that I will work for the next 30 years at all. When the job's finished, that's it."

These are not complaints, but realities, and Craigie is deeply passionate about theatre and its capacity to enhance our understanding of the world, which struck her as young girl in the most unlikely circumstances. "The first time I really knew that theatre was for me," she says, "was at a production of Borstal Boy at the Abbey. It was a play about young men in a remand home, and I had no knowledge of this kind of life at all. In fact, if I had been told this story in a classroom at the time it probably would have frightened me. But the play opened up a whole different world to me. It expanded my empathy, my sympathy, my understanding of the world. The world is so judgmental, but theatre allows you to know someone else's life, and the more you know the less the world is black and white."

Craigie has worked extensively on film too - "although less so these days; there are fewer parts for women on film as they get older." In fact, one of her most recognisable performances was as Mary Jane in John Huston's film version of The Dead in 1981, which Craigie, in an amusing anecdote, calls "the easiest job I ever got. I didn't even have to meet John Huston to get the part. I merely met the producers. They asked if I played the piano and, like any self-respecting actor would, I lied. They asked me to go LA then to meet Huston, but I had a job in London and couldn't go. Somehow I got cast anyway. I was worried that when I finally got to meet him, he would say, 'That's not the right girl. That's not the one I wanted.' But when I arrived in LA for the filming, I went up to him, and said 'Hello. I am Ingrid Craigie.' He just looked at me, and said 'Of course you are.'"

IN 2007 Ingrid Craigie received the Special Tribute honour at The Irish Times Theatre AwardS for her contribution to Irish theatre. Even now, she seems vaguely embarrassed by the award. "It was a great compliment of course, but overwhelming. It's funny but I don't often dwell on how people see me, so to have recognition like that is an odd experience." Such a lack of self-awareness in a woman who has spent her life performing in public may seem a bit affected, but Craigie's sense of self-containment appears to be as much a condition of her career as a contradiction of it.

"I don't think I've ever thought of not being an actor," she concludes, "but I don't need to be an actor to exist, and I've done enough good work to know that. That work might only be 'a small flame in a dark world' - as Terence Rattigan would say - but that is enough for me."

The Deep Blue Sea opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday

CRAIGIE'S CHOICE ROLES OF HONOUR

On playing Grace in the Gate's 2004 production of Brian Friel's Faith Healer:

"I knew when I saw the first production that I wanted to play that part."

On playing Frances in Marina Carr's 2002 play Ariel:

"An impossibly dark play, and what a production! We thought we'd never finish the run alive!"

On playing Valerie in the Centaur Montreal's 2000 production of Conor McPherson's The Weir:

"To lose a child and then to think that you hear it talking to you. The journey for that character is overwhelming."

On her role in Sarah Kane's 1998 play Crave: "Rehearsals with her were a blast. She was really very funny and a joy to be with, even though the play was so dark. I was genuinely shocked when I heard that she had finally committed suicide: I really thought that she was someone who I would know all my life."

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times