Owen Roe - now the most magnetic figure on the Irish stage

The born stars of Irish theatre head for the Hollywood hills, but – with a bit of luck – less obvious greats such as Owen Roe have been allowed to grow

THERE'S A THING Owen Roe does with his face in his searing performance as Frank Hardy in Brian Friel's Faith Healerat the Gate. Like Michael Gambon, with whom it is no longer ridiculous to compare him, he has a face large enough to magnify the smallest movements. Now and then – maybe five times over the course of the two monologues that he delivers – he gives his features a truly terrifying cast. The lively eyes go cold. The charm and plausibility evaporate. The forehead stretches, the cheeks become sharp and hard and the mouth is twisted into something between a grin and a grimace.

It is the look that Hardy’s wife Grace describes – him looking past her into the mystery of whatever dark power it is that makes him both healer and destroyer. When it settles on Roe’s face, for just a few seconds at a time, it evokes both pity and terror. It shows us a haunted man. It also shows us a killer. It is the look of Macbeth seeing Banquo’s ghost.

The ability to do this, to freeze the elusive and contradictory essence of Frank Hardy in a physical gesture, is the mark of a great actor. Which is, rather wonderfully, what Owen Roe has become. Wonderfully – and rather surprisingly. For Roe’s emergence as the Irish theatre’s leading man has been a long, slow process and a rather precarious one. A few years ago, there was a widespread belief that he was on the verge of giving up acting and looking for a proper job in order to make a stable living. That such a possibility could even be contemplated is a mark of the fragility of the Irish theatre.

Leading dramatic actors are rare creatures, not least because, if they're that good, they usually end up elsewhere. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I started reviewing theatre, it was entirely obvious who the big, dominant male leads would be 30 years hence. There was a lithe and edgy young Northerner in a raw play called Kriegat the Project. There was a charismatic young Dubliner who had smallish parts in other Project plays and then the lead in Tom Murphy's Famine. And there was another Northerner, with a looming and magnetic presence, who caught the eye in plays like Bernard Farrell's I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Felland then quickly emerged literally as a major player in Murphy's The Informer. They were called Ciaran Hinds, Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson. And none of them was ever heard of again.

What happens, of course, to leading Irish actors is London, New York, the movies, TV. If you’re Brendan Gleeson or Aidan Gillen you’d have to be some kind of pervert to hang around scraping a precarious living in the Irish theatre when the alternative is Martin Scorsese or The Wire.

So where does the theatre get its middle-aged heroes, the large-scale veterans with layers of experience and emotion who can perform a classic role such as that of Frank Hardy? The born stars, the luminaries who shine from the beginning, won’t stay either in the theatre or in Ireland. What has to happen is that the less obvious talents, the “fine character actors”, are allowed to grow.

It is probably stupidity on my part, but I never would have regarded Roe as a likely contender. He was, of course, a superbly skilled and versatile actor. His comic gifts were obvious as far back as Scrap Saturdayon the radio. He was deeply moving as John Proctor in a superb Abbey production (by John Crowley) of The Crucible. And he was memorable as the Irish Man in Ben Barnes's production of The Gigli Concert. But, even in retrospect, I don't think those performances pointed to the likelihood of him making the leap toward the point where he can perform Frank Hardy and not have everyone of a certain age pining for Donal McCann.

Over the past five years, though, Roe has become an extraordinary actor.

This has something to do with the way in which he has inhabited his own physical presence on the stage. He always had a splendid voice in which power and warmth, lyricism and resonance combine. But as he has become larger physically, he has added the kind of poignancy that Gambon embodies so magnificently – the delicacy and fragility that are so much more heartbreaking in a giant frame than in a nimble little sprite. He understands that a big man’s gestures and expressions can easily become crudely demonstrative mugging. So he turns this problem on its head, exploiting the fact that small movements and faint touches will be amplified by his own scale. He doesn’t need to strive for effect, but rather to undercut the largeness of voice and presence that he possesses. He has learned to do this brilliantly.

It is not accidental that the three roles in which Roe has emerged as the most magnetic figure on the Irish stage are those of broken, middle-aged men, wracked with mental pain: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (in Selina Cartmell's production); the title character in Uncle Vanyaat the Gate in 2007 and Frank Hardy. The roles have varying degrees of black humour, which allow him to draw on his comic background. But they are shaped above all by a deeply poignant sense of doom. Titus, Vanya and Hardy all exist in a kind of afterlife, with no possibility of escaping a fate that is already settled for them. Roe is supremely good at investing that painful slide towards death with an unsentimental dignity.

Irish theatre is lucky to have him – in more sense than one. One is always fortunate to live through the prime of a major performer. But there is also, less happily, an element of luck in the fact that Roe has survived long enough to blossom. There is no career structure in which unspectacular talent can ferment into greatness. As spending cuts bite and opportunities diminish, that situation is likely to get worse.