Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Sinead Cusack: Dark heroine of a New York story

Always outspoken, Sinead Cusack relishes the ambiguity in Neil LaBute's post-September 11 tale. Not everyone was a hero that day, she tells Paul Taylor

Thursday 30 October 2003 01:00 GMT
Comments

The last time that Sinead Cusack opened to the press in a major role, it was under a sudden and striking additional strain. A few hours before she unveiled her Cleopatra in Stratford, the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which she is a member, was informed of Adrian Noble's shock decision to resign as artistic director. Cusack had been one of his staunchest and most outspoken allies in the campaign for a radical redevelopment of the Stratford site, even helping him to put the case for the demolition of the current 1930s Royal Shakespeare Theatre to a House of Commons select committee. And now the same man, having secured his financial future with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was bailing out. "It was a hard blow to take, that one, actually," admits Cusack. "Yeah, I was shaken."

It says a lot for the actress's strength of character that she went on to give a much acclaimed performance as the wily serpent of old Nile, and that she can still speak with affection and admiration about the positive aspects of Noble's tenure. All the same, she must have been relieved not to have had a similar bombshell on the night, last week, that she took to the stage of the Almeida Theatre for previews the British premiere of Neil LaBute's contentious play, The Mercy Seat, which is set on 12 September 2001. Cusack plays Abby, a New York executive and the mistress of Ben, a younger subordinate who would have perished in the Twin Towers, had he not stopped by her downtown apartment that morning for a spot of oral sex. Unfolding in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, the play offers a bracing corrective to the view that this was a time of uniform heroism and selflessness. With Ben refusing to ring his wife to tell her that he has survived, and concocting, instead, a crazy plan to start again from scratch, the couple wrangle over what kind of a new life together could be sustained on that shaky moral basis.

In her mid-fifties, Cusack is as beautiful as ever, or perhaps more than ever, for along with the amused challenge of those periwinkle blue eyes and the Irish fire, there is now the loveliness of undisguised experience in her face. We meet in a rather bleak, empty dressing room at the Almeida and for some reason, maybe because of all the mirrors, I found myself bringing up the subject of plastic surgery and how disastrous it can be for an actor. I mention a thirtysomething performer whose facelift has given her the permanent look of a practising ventriloquist. "Now why would a beautiful woman want to do that to herself?" agrees Cusack. She appraises her own reflection in the mirror: "I found another line this morning. I mean, how on earth do they happen overnight?"

Given that her first ambition, as a girl, was to be a saint, Cusack now radiates a refreshing lack of piety, which is just as well, considering the nature of LaBute's play. She rejects the notion that The Mercy Seat is systematically cynical, as extreme in its depiction of spineless self-interest as the tabloid press was in insisting that everyone who died on September 11 was a hero. "LaBute writes about it so - what's the word? - so incautiously," she laughs. "But he has the courage to force us to examine issues that maybe we would be happier to keep hidden from ourselves. There were many noble reactions on that day and many that were ignoble. We're all a mixture of the two, and we don't know where the balance lies until we're faced with a crisis. Recently I've been thinking of Jo Moore and the memo she sent about it being a good day to bury bad news. She was somebody who probably thought of herself as a decent, compassionate, caring human being, and yet her behaviour on that day was something we viewed with disgusted fascination."

Ben's plan of absconding incognito from his current life and of allowing his wife and children to think that he died a "hero" is, it emerges, one of convenience and cowardice. His self-serving argument is that the scheme would actually spare people's feelings in the long run, being the ideal way of avoiding a messy and painful divorce. If we are to believe that Abby would be prepared to consider that proposition, Cusack has to convince us of the character's love for this man who is a dozen years her junior, and an employee to boot. "New York is a city of a lot of single women in their forties. Abby has clawed her way up the corporate ladder and she has had to eat piles of shit to get where she has got, and there's comfort in sex and there's comfort in love. It's not the most satisfactory affair - he's married, for heaven's sake. But if she's to progress from being a mistress to something closer, it has to be based on a common morality or she knows that the relationship will be doomed. Ben sees things differently."

While certainly bleak for female executives in the Big Apple, the middle years are not traditionally a bed of roses for an actress. But Cusack counts herself singularly lucky in having had a triple whammy of wonderfully rewarding roles. In 1998, she scooped up all the prizes for her deeply affecting tour de force in Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo, a memory play in which the monstrous, dying Mai, "the first woman in Sligo to wear trousers", hallucinates episodes from her sad, alcoholic past. Then there was Cleopatra in her famed, infinite variety, and now Abby - the last two under the direction of Michael Attenborough, the Almeida's new chief.

As with the Redgrave dynasty, the theatrical gene is rampagingly dominant in the Cusack clan. All of Sinead's siblings and half-siblings are involved in drama. She and her husband, Jeremy Irons, have turned down lucrative offers to appear on stage together in married-thesp vehicles such as Private Lives. Not that her father, Cyril, the legendary Irish actor, was ever exactly encouraging about a career in this field. "He first went on stage when he was five years old, and for the next 10 years went to a different school every four days. He'd have to knock on the schoolyard door and say, 'I'm with the actors, can I come in?' It was such a rootless existence, and I don't think you ever recover from that, really." The stability he had lacked he imposed on his own children by ruling the household with a rod of iron. He was apoplectic on discovering that a television set had been smuggled into the family home while he was away. "During his tirade, however, he accidentally switched it on - and was hooked forever."

It must have been tricky when she, Sorcha and Niamh acted with him in a celebrated production of The Three Sisters. "Oh, it was full of incident and full of difficulty because he still treated us like recalcitrant children who needed to be disciplined if we did it wrongly." Hard, too, for Noble. "Yes, Cyril wouldn't talk to Adrian," she laughs. "He didn't deal with directors; he just ignored the whole issue." Cusack declares herself happy with Michael Boyd, Noble's successor at the RSC, particularly in the measures he has taken to reinvigorate the ensemble. "I think we made some terrible mistakes - and the move to the Roundhouse was one of them. But it did prove one point very comprehensively, because the demographics of that audience were massively different from those of Stratford and the Barbican. We identified a problem; we solved it badly."

As I prepare to leave, the conversation gravitates back to LaBute's new play. Did she imagine, I wonder, that there were adulterous couples who had actually put into pitiless practice the 9/11 escape plan of his antihero? "There was a woman who disappeared to another state in order to get out of a relationship with her mother," Cusack replies. "But, no, I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that there were lovers who did a vanishing act." If there were, they'd be well advised to steer clear of The Mercy Seat.

'The Mercy Seat', Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London N1 (020-7359 4404; www.almeida.co.uk) to 6 December

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in