T.P. McKenna doesn’t think too highly of Marlon Brando. Which is ironic because T.P is precisely the type of politically-aware actor that makes a lie of Il Padrone’s assertion that all thespians are thick, neurotic, self-centred, and solipsistic. Indeed, in a profession where many actors quite pathetically believe that a conversational shift of focus can be marked by the line “enough about me, what did you think of my last play?”, McKenna is almost a punk.

Currently starring in Brian Friel’s play, Molly Sweeney , at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, McKenna is probably as well known for his work in cinema and television as he is for his nearly 40 year career in theatre.

He joined the Abbey in 1955 and remained with them for eight frustrating years. Moving to London he fared much better, appearing in The Ginger Man, Julius Caesar and The Seagull at the Royal Court; and in Exiles, The Balcony and The Devil’s Disciple with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His television appearances include The Avengers, Bleak House, Rumpole, The Chief, Holocaust, The Mannions of America and Scarlett and Black. Among his 31 films are two adaptations of Joyce, Ulysses and Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man plus Straw Dogs, Anne of a Thousand Days, Charge of the Light Brigade and Red Scorpion.

And now, in a sense, he has crowned his career with a tour-de-force performance in Friel’s Molly Sweeney , a prismatic play which tells the tale of a blind woman, her doctor and lover and the points at which their lives intersect. McKenna plays the doctor, and his part demands that he memorise many long, intricate monologues. So, how is he bearing up to Friel’s literary virility test, in this respect?

“The learning is out of the way, obviously, but it certainly doesn’t get any easier as you get older!” he says, happily humouring the double entendre. “I have 13 monologues in all and the language is intricate and, as such, you have to tune up to it in a way that I’ve never done before. I’ve never done a one-man show. I shy away from them because they’ve nothing to do with acting. Acting is thus described, because it is inter-acting between a group of people, whereas in Molly Sweeney you are telling a story, in essence. This involves an entirely different dynamic than the one I’m used to on stage and that, too, is quite demanding.”

If one person shows, such as, for example, Michael McLiammóir’s The Importance of Being Oscar, have nothing to do with acting, how then would T.P. McKenna describe them?

“As performances” he says, categorically. “Acting and performing are two different things. And, in fairness one would have to put a big question mark over McLiammóir as an actor. He was more of an exhibitionist. Whereas, the really fine actors, like Robert De Niro, merge their own personalities with the character, as written by the author. You have to find parallels within yourself, rather than impose yourself on the part. There is a subtle difference. And the latter really has far more to do with performing than acting, in the purest sense.”

Does this purist approach to acting explain why T.P McKenna recently claimed that during the 1950s Marlon Brando had a “terrible effect” on a whole generation of actors?

“That was just a throwaway remark” he explains, before adding “but I won’t withdraw it. Brando, as far as I’m concerned, has disgraced his talent. He just withdrew from acting. But he was such a powerful personality that when he originally came onto Broadway, in A Streetcar Named Desire, as Stanley Kowalski, he had this incredible power, magnetism and magic. Then he did that wonderful performance in On The Waterfront . But then you fast forward and look at him 20 years later in Last Tango In Paris and what is he doing? He’s reading his lines! They change the camera angle but I can easily see that he is reading his lines! He wouldn’t learn lines in the last 20, 30 years. That’s what I mean when I say he just withdrew from acting.”

What did McKenna mean when he said Brando exerted a negative influence on a generation of actors.

“From the beginning of his film career, in the 1950s, too many actors simply began to imitate the style of acting which he developed for On The Waterfront . Everybody started to mumble and adopt those mannerisms because we were all besotted by the method approach to acting in that sense.”

So is he agreeing with commentators who claim that the Lee Strasberg School of acting, as originally practised by Brando, James Dean, Rod Steiger and Eve Marie Saint was a bastardisation of Stanislavsky’s so-called “method”?

“Well, it was very much taken over by the Actor’s Studio, as run by Strasberg,” he says. “And he did turn it into a sort of mystical thing, with himself as its messiah, in a sense. If you weren’t part of his group of actors you were allowed into the Actor’s Studio but only as an observer and you had to be very reverential and remember that every one of his talks was being recorded for posterity. But there’s no doubt that if you didn’t really feel the part you were supposed to be playing you’d give him the lie and tell him you did, rather than go against his teaching. In that way it did become a travesty of Stanislavsy’s ideas.

“In his first book, Stanislavsky puts forward the idea that, in a play, an actor has a series of ‘given conditions’ such as, for example, if this was a play and you were interviewing me, how differently would you interpret this script if there was a bottle of gin on the table we were drinking, rather than coffee? So, as an actor Stanislavsky suggests you must work within those given conditions and ask yourself, what am I doing? How am I doing it? And why am I doing it? That defines the action in the scene. It’s a key to the psychology of a character. And that is the Stanislavsky method, in essence.

“What Brando did had more to do with mannerisms, and self-indulgence and egotism. Apart from that I think he is a very stupid man. I don’t think he has a brain in his head. I’ve never heard him make an intelligent remark about anything. Okay, he’s fine when it comes to worthy causes, like the plight of Native Americans but, as I say in Molly Sweeney, in relation to someone else, ‘he’s a great man for worthy causes, and worthy pursuits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s intelligent’.”

T. P. McKenna was born in Mullagh, Co. Cavan in 1929. His conversion to acting came when he played in a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan, at Cavan’s St. Patrick’s School.

“People scoff at Gilbert and Sullivan but the language is wonderful. Gilbertian wit is very funny,” he says. “I was out there one night acting in Patience and it suddenly was like getting a fix. I was gone. I realised immediately this is what I want to do. And at 16, I went up to Dublin and joined the Gaiety School of Acting.

In fact, when he originally came to Dublin it was as an employee of the Ulster Bank, where he earned £8 a week. Having left the bank and joined Milo O’Shea, who offered him a part in Summer Follies, at Dublin’s tiny Pike Theatre, McKenna’s wages dropped to £2 a week. But he persisted. The play that really hooked him was Eugene O’ Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night , in which he played Jamie.

“He was the cynical, failed actor, so I really could relate to that too,” he says, smiling at the memory. “He’s the one who says ‘gimme a room with a bath’. But what I loved about playing Jamie was that it was the first role I did which had more than one and a half dimensions. That’s when I really got the acting bug.”

However, this dedication to the fine art of acting was somewhat wasted in the Abbey Theatre during the late ’50s, and early ’60s.

“The policy of the Abbey was to do new Irish writing and, at the time, the Friels, the Leonards hadn’t come along and we were doing some appalling work,” he explains. “They were all one dimensional parts that were being written and they nearly drove me mad!”

T. P. McKenna isn’t being as flippant about that period of his life as it might seem. Appearing in this succession of ‘appalling’ plays in the Abbey allegedly led to a massive haemorrhage. Is that true?

“Who told you that?” he asks, not expecting an answer. “In fact that haemorrhage was the culmination of events, not just the one you describe. But part of it was that I had just turned 30 and was having a crisis of confidence as a result of my time in the Abbey. So that, plus a few emotional things happening in my life, led to my awakening one night feeling I was swallowing something. Then I sat up and blood started pouring out. My wife gave me a cold cream jar to rub some cream on the back of my neck and went back to sleep and when you see that much blood (lifts up coffee beaker) in a container it is pretty frightening. So, believe me, that cold cream jar was soon spread across the wall of the bedroom, as I said to my wife: ‘I’m bleeding to death here and you fucking go asleep.’(laughs).

“I was transferred to hospital and what had happened was that the Abbey doctor had misdiagnosed my ailment and cauterised the wrong part of my nose. But I lost so much blood that I was on blood transfusions and, following this, I had three months sick leave and Dr. McAuliffe Curtin came and said ‘I don’t know what the cause of this is, but you are in a terrible state of tension and there are only two ways to deal with that – adapt to it, or change it’. So, at that stage I knew that one of the things I’d have to do is leave the Abbey.”

And head for London. But not before making his first, and last visit to a psychiatrist, McKenna recalls.

“Originally, how I dealt with that emotional crisis in my life was to go out onto Sandymount Strand every day and take long walks and do breathing exercises and so on,” he says. “That way I began to feel positive about things and had a complete rehabilitation. But I also was sent to a psychiatrist, which helped – because he was barmy! Anthony Clare has told me this man has long since left the profession, because he was around the bend! Yet, he had me on tranquillisers, whatever. Then one day I went into his office and he had his head buried in his hands and I said ‘How are you?’ He looked up, in great pain, and said ‘I’ve had a very, very, very, bad day’. So I just said ‘sorry to hear about that’. Then he put his face back in his hands and I sat there waiting for something to happen until he suddenly shuddered and said ‘but, how are you?’ And at that point the phone rang and he picked it up very quickly and said ‘I’m not here’. Then it rang again and he almost snarled ‘I told you, I am not here’. He was barking mad and I couldn’t wait to get out the door!

“I ran down from St. Patrick’s Mental Hospital, roaring out loud with laughter, saying to myself ‘and you’ve been in with that mad fucker, trying to get cured. Wise up!’ And I never went back!”

It should have been the highlight of T. P. McKenna’s career when he starred in the movies Ulysses and Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Both, however, were directed by Joseph Strick – and badly directed at that, according to T. P. McKenna, whose love for James Joyce is as obvious as his loathing for Strick.

“For one thing, Strick treated us appallingly,” he says. “He paid us buttons and I always felt he was just exploiting Joyce. Strick came from a background of documentaries and I will never forgive him for the way he shot the dinner party in Portrait of the Artist. That dinner party is one of the great set-pieces in literature and the way it should have been done was with the care John Huston lavished on a similar scene in The Dead.

“Although Strick was a millionaire, to cut costs during that dinner scene he had no candles on the tables because that makes for continuity problems – in that you have to keep changing the candles to make sure they are burned to the same height they were before the last cut. And instead of shooting on a track around the table, which allows the camera to move in and around actors, he put the camera on a tripod at the end of the table, did two long shots and then left it at ‘chokers’ – head and shoulders – for the rest of the scene. He shot it in two and a half days, whereas it should have taken a week. It’s a disgrace.

“Strick was terribly autocratic and terribly tense and no one could tell him anything. It was a dreadful experience, all told. The worst thing about the man is that he was totally humourless and that is fatal

when it comes to interpreting Joyce, because Joyce is wickedly funny.”

So, who among contemporary Irish directors, does T. P. McKenna believe would make a great interpreter of Joyce’s work?

“Somebody like Jim Sheridan or Neil Jordan,” he says, immediately. “Though I think Jim is probably nearer to the spirit of Joyce than Jordan is. But you have to be Irish to properly interpret Joyce, because Joyce is the most Irish, Irish writer of all time. And I think Jim would capture that, because he is the quintessential Dubliner.”

When it comes to the question of Irish identity has McKenna ever encountered a film script that crystallised his own specific political perspective?

“There was one play written by Denis Johnson, called The Scythe and the Sunset and he had written it as a mirror image to The Plough and the Stars “ he says. “But its central character was a British officer who’s captured by the IRA and brought to a café, where it transpires that he is Irish. It’s a very interesting play, set in 1916. And that I relate very strongly to the fact that I grew up in a home that was very much influenced by Civil War politics.

“I had an uncle who was in the same class, in UCD, as Kevin Barry and who was involved in the same ambush in which Barry was captured – though my uncle escaped,” he recalls. “And my grandfather ran the 1918 East Cavan by-election for Arthur Griffith. He had been a Parnellite, but deserted the nationalist party and joined Sinn Fein after 1916. And he played an important role in getting Griffith elected.

“Apart from that, my father was an intelligence officer in the north Meath IRA, under Michael Collins. He voted against the Treaty but when the majority went for the Treaty he said ‘Dev’s attitude is that the majority have no right to do wrong’ and I was brought up on that ethos. That’s my original political base, in summation.”

T. P. McKenna is now a card-carrying member of the British Labour Party. How would he define his politics these days?

“I’m very involved in the Labour Party, even though I don’t go to the local constituency meetings,” he explains. “But I have very strong views which were sharpened to a great extent by the arrival of that disastrous woman Margaret Thatcher. And I read a lot on economics, including recent revisionist examinations of Thatcherism which highlight the complete fallacies in her approach to the economy. That whole market-rule philosophy is a load of balls. It doesn’t work.”

What, then, does McKenna think of the Labour Party’s current position on Northern Ireland?

“I stand full square behind the Labour Party although, unlike the British government as it stands, the Labour Party would not give any encouragement to the Unionists. The present government is in hock to them because of a small majority. ”

Does McKenna believe that, despite Official Unionist Party protestations to the contrary, Jim Molyneaux did do some form of shadowy deal with John Major?

“Yeah, I do” he says, categorically. “I would say there is an accommodation of some sort there. Major needs them. But when people talk about the ‘unionist veto’ I have to say: ‘how long do we have to listen to Ian Paisley sing the same oul song: ‘no, no, no,no, no’? That’s all he ever says. And I’m a nationalist, so I’m fed up with him. I can’t stand him. But, that said, where Sinn Féin are concerned I don’t believe you can bomb, kill, maim your way to the negotiating table, especially when you haven’t even got 10% support in the whole population of the 32 counties, for God’s sake.

“The unionists really are such a boring bunch with their endless cries of ‘no’. They never say anything else. They are brain dead. And now they’re out on a limb and the British don’t give a goddamn about them. And they moan and whinge. What do they expect? They certainly won’t get any support from the Labour Party. And I wouldn’t be a member of any party that gave them support.”

Making quite a dramatic shift from the politics of contemporary Ireland to the eternal politics of sexual longing, T. P. McKenna suddenly admits that what disturbs him most about ageing is the distance it creates between his arms and the limbs of young women. Or a specific, idealised “girl”, to paraphrase Yeats, whose poem ‘Politics’ he recites from memory to make his final point.

“People ask me if I’m bothered to be in a profession – as in film more so than theatre – which seems to have no use for actors over a certain age, but it doesn’t. What really bothers me is being the age I am – full stop! I’d dearly like to be 25 years younger, say around 40. And I’ll tell you why, to quote Yeats:

‘How can I, that girl standing there/My attention fix/On Roman or on Russian/Or on Spanish politics/Yet here’s a travelled man that knows/What he talks about/And there’s a politician/That has both read and thought/And maybe what they say is true/Of war and war’s alarms/But oh that I were young again/And held her in my arms’.

Is that all that bothers T. P. McKenna now that he’s 65?

“That’s all it is! And that’s all there is. End of story.”

• T.P. McKenna is currently starring in Brian Friel’s production of his own play Molly Sweeney at The Gate Theatre in Dublin.