Marie happy to be out of ‘comfort zone’ with Druid

The accepted wisdom is that nothing ages you like having children – partly because they add years to you! But, more importantly, their growing older means you can’t avoid the implications for yourself. It could be said that acting does the same thing – ask Marie Mullen, who is now revisiting plays with Druid that the company first did in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In Druid’s latest offering, The Colleen Bawn – as with Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming – she is taking on a senior role, while the part she originally played here is in the hands of Aisling O’Sullivan.  Actually, Marie was always capable of playing a range of ages, she says with a laugh. In fact, in Druid’s early days, when there was a limited pool of actors, she had to.
“Now I’m the right age to do these roles, but I could do them in my 20s as well when Garry first cast me – what does that say about me?”
Marie is happy to be working on a light-hearted show after being involved with Druid’s recent Tom Murphy trilogy, but nonetheless she describes The Colleen Bawn as “a good challenge”. She is “out of her comfort zone” because of the language in this Victorian melodrama about love and money, in which she plays the lady of the manor she explains.
“It’s taken me a while to get the measure of its language and rhythm – it doesn’t come easy to me. I have to be very particular getting the words and meaning out.  You have to own it and take responsibility for it.”