Soldier blues

Aidan Kelly has played pretty strong and visceral roles in plays like The Barbaric Comedies, The Shaughran and Juno And The Paycock. And he’s set to do the same in Sarah Kane’s play Blasted which opens at Dublin’s Project cube on November 22nd. But much as Aidan may be loathe to admit it he’s probably best known for his role in The Cassidys right now. In other words the flop RTE sitcom that will be remembered as having started the same night and season time as the critically and publicly acclaimed Bachelor’s Walk. But, as Aidan points out, an actor’s got to live.

“I need the money!” he says.”It’s starting to happen in theatre now that I can make choices, decided to do one play and not another. But when it comes to TV or films it’s like I get the offer, I realise I have no money, no work coming up so I go for it. But I won’t diss The Cassidys. Okay, it didn’t work but everyone on the show broke their balls to make it work. To make the most of what we were given to do. Yet I wouldn’t say that Bachelor’s Walk necessarily made The Cassidys look bad. But they should never have gone out on the same station on the same night.”

Aidan also “played a small part” in Kirsten Sheridans Disco Pigs and appeared in the same director’s movie Majella McGinty as well as Michael Collins. Indeed, he got into the latter, and acting, largely because he didn’t want to follow the path of his father into welding. Aidan had been “involved with a youth theatre company in Bray called Dry Rain” and later did a stint in Fair City.

“Dave Duffy, who is still in Fair City, once said the greatest thing to me,” Aidan recalls.” We were in RTE on one St. Patrick’s Day and the canteen was closed and we couldn’t get any food. And we were basically sitting there like fucking eejits, with nothing to do, and Dave said “this is it, mate. This takes the glamour out of acting. It’s just a job.”

Even so, there also are moments, in the middle of even rehearsing a play like Blasted when Aidan Kelly realises the choice he made in terms of a career was “absolutely right.”

“A lot of actors do it for that buzz,” he explains. ”And Blasted is a buzz. It’s dark and harrowing but there’s also a lot of black humour in it. At first, reading the script, I didn’t get that but as soon as we started delivering the lines I did.”

The play focuses on a couple Ian (Lalor Roddy) and Cate (Fiona O’Shaughnessy, who meet in a room to carry on – or not – their love affair. But at one point they are interrupted by ‘The Soldier’ played by Aidan.

“I come on about half way through the play” he says. “And when the soldier comes on it changes everything. He gives it a very different energy than what was going on before. There’s a war going on outside the room and this soldier bursts into the room and takes with him his own history. And the only thing that seems to matter to him is his girlfriend who was raped and shot up the vagina and had all kinds of terrible things done to her. And he takes that out on the guy in the room. And he tells stories about having taken it out on other people as well. It’s literally an explosive energy he brings into the room. Hell, in fact.”

So is there a line of redemption, a glimmer of hope in Blasted, which is directed by Jimmy Fay?

“There is, yeah, but unfortunately what happens with a lot of these plays is that people don’t stick around for the end” he says. “People shouldn’t do that because then they’ll miss the point of resolution, or whatever, the scene that – hopefully – makes it all make sense. And, definitely, for those people who do stick with Blasted right until it finishes there is light at the end of that tunnel. However dim that bulb glows.”