A FAMILIAR face on television and film, Belfast actor Patrick O'Kane is back where it all began this month with the Lyric Theatre's production of Denouement.
Set in 2048 as Armageddon approaches, Liam (Patrick O'Kane) and Edel (Anna Healy) are living out their final hours, cut off from friends and family in a remote Irish farmhouse.
Ormeau Road man Patrick O'Kane has come a long way since making his Lyric debut back in 1990 in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, and it was at the very same venue ten years earlier that he was first bitten by the acting bug while a pupil at St Malachy's College when he watched a school production of Marlowe's Jew of Malta on the Stranmillis stage.
"I was always very sporty and got a real buzz from sport, and this was the only other time that I had this visceral response to something," he recalls.
"And then a week later as chance would have it we had an actress lodging with us. My sister was away in Leeds at University so we had a spare room. I still don’t know to this day how my parents were friends with the actress’ parents, but they were and she was doing a show in the old Lyric and she stayed with us.
"Now I was 14 or 15 and this exotic 24-year-old actress came to stay and I was kind of besotted in that teenage way. I’d be coming home from school at 4.30 and she was just getting up, and this was probably 1979-80 and then a week after the Jew of Malta I went to see her in her play and I got the same sort of response and I said, I’d like to do that."
A couple of years later and Patrick was working on the building sites in London and blagged his way into a meeting with well-known casting director Patsy Pollock who was casting for the movie Cal at the time. He didn't get a part in the film but she advised him to go to university before applying for drama school to get some life experience. While at university at Manchester he took part in student productions and drama festivals. After that it was a struggle to find any roles but the breakthrough came at the Lyric in 1990 and he hasn't looked back since.
"I was on a steep learning curve," says Patrick. "Soon after I did The Plough and The Stars at The Abbey. It was also Brendan Gleeson’s first time on the Abbey stage."
Patrick O'Kane
Denouement is set to run at the Lyric for the best part of a month with the opening night on October 21. Written by John Morton, it is directed by Jimmy Fay.
"It's set in the not-too-distant future and he’s quite consciously decided not to say if it’s a nuclear apocalypse or a climate change apocalypse but you get a sense that a climactic thing has happened," says Patrick.
"My character, Liam, is trying to write a memoir of his life. He appears to be completely self-obsessed, almost to the point of narcissism and neglecting of the needs of his wife Edel whose main task is to try and make contact with our adult children. So she’s on the computer and the phone and I’ve rejected all that modern technology and I’m on an old fashioned type-writer, typing away, probably a lot to her irritation while she’s trying to talk to me.
"There are a lot of ironically funny moments. Because the situation is so extreme and they’re behaving in such extreme ways it gets kind of ridiculous and funny although they don’t necessarily see the funny side of it.
"It’s a couple who’ve been together for a long time and know how to press each other’s buttons and how much pressure to apply and when to let go.
"It really is a love story in the most unlikely of settings and the most unlikely of circumstances and it is a hard fought, hard earned love story but it is a love story. It’s a love story between two people but also it is a love story for humanity itself."
Denouement runs at the Lyric Theatre from 21 October to 15 November. Tickets available here.
