Actor and writer Mark taking a walk on Wilde side in The Importance of Nothing

“Acting and writing come from the same imaginative place,” says Mark O’Halloran, who will be in Galway’s Black Box Theatre next Monday, April 23, performing in The Importance of Nothing with Pan Pan Theatre Company.

Directed by Gavin Quinn, The Importance of Nothing is set in an imaginary prison where Oscar Wilde’s life and work are used by drama therapist Lady Lancing to test the prisoners’ imaginations and their patience.

Along with Mark, the ensemble cast includes Andrew Bennett, Anna Sheils McNamee, Sonya Kelly and Dylan Tighe.

“The play is mental and it’s also very funny,” says Clare-born Mark, “Stylistically, it’s out there but it’s also accessible. The audience is having a ball with it and we’re having the craic with it.”

The Irish Independent’s reviewer concurred, describing “passages about growing up gay in Ennis and Limerick, and poetry readings on a bus to Bundoran . . .[as] very funny”.

From Ennis, Mark has been very open about how it felt to grow up gay in a largely rural county where, even with a supportive family, “I thought I was the only gay person on the planet”.

He doesn’t dwell on the negatives and says he had a good time with his friends, “having a growing awareness of Rock and Roll and going to gigs”. The fact that 58 per cent of people in County Clare voted in favour of the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum showed him how much life had changed there since the 1980s.

Mark had always wanted to be an actor and would “devour interviews with actors, wondering how they did it”. But, in those days in small-town Ireland saying “I want to be an actor was like saying you had two heads,” he says with a laugh. It wasn’t an option.

After his Leaving Cert, Mark went to UCG, studying Science but dropped out after a year.

He then went to Amsterdam and worked in a job that his uncle had found him, saving enough money to study at the Gaiety School of Acting.

“My career wasn’t meteoric,” he says of life after graduation. “There were a lot of two-line roles here and there but I kept at it.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.