No Taming Pauline

It's 20 years since she started acting, and more than ten since the start of Father Ted. But with lead roles in a new Shakespeare production, a film in the Dublin film festival and a comedy series by Jennifer Saunders, there's no taming Pauline McLynn.

It's impossible to get a straightforward answer out of Pauline McLynn. The conversation streams out of her, but it barely manages to keep up with her facial expressions and body language. Every word is accompanied by some gesture – a shrug, a laugh, a grimace, a smile – that puts a crucial emphasis on it. It's difficult to quite capture this on the page.

Can she ever get away from Father Ted?

(Bursts into frenetic conversation.) "The 'ah, go on go on go on' thing, you know. (Arches eyebrows.) It still happens about twice a day. (Hurriedly.) And if it didn't, I would think, (exclaims, high note) 'oh god, have people forgotten it?' (Brief pause, concentrated look.) So that's lovely. (Nostalgic.) And Ted will always be there. It's kind of like Fawlty Towers in that way. (Reflective, looks into the distance.) It doesn't depend on any current affairs situation, it just depends on itself. It starts in the same place every week, on this magical island that has no west side because that fell into the sea. (Incredulous, laughs.) And they're still all there, killing one another (fondly) and doing mad things, I'm sure of it. The comedy doesn't depend on anything except that mad stupid world... So I think it's always going to be around… (Sighs.)

She would talk for Ireland, talks non stop for the hour-long interview, leaving her Caesar salad and chips – which she orders which a self-deprecating, apologetic grimace and then proceeds to press on me ("ah go on, have a chip, go on, you will, you will, you will") – almost untouched and charming the photographer out of his socks in the process. To say nothing of myself.

And everything she says is refracted through her body language and facial expressions so that you can't quite take it at face value. A serious comment is immediately moderated by a self-deprecating shrug and a laugh, saying 'don't take me too seriously'. We talk about her upcoming play, playing the Shrew in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew with Rough Magic, about Ted (as she calls it, quite sweetly), about the actor's life, about her father, who died late last year, about life 'n' stuff. She talks effusively about everything, apparently without artifice.

She's worked with Lynn Parker, Rough Magic's director, since they were in Trinity Players twenty years ago ("20 years ago, ohh", she says) where they did A Midsummer Night's Dream together. Parker and some other friends formed Rough Magic a year out of college, and though McLynn wasn't a founding member, she soon began working with them.

"I've been something of a pain in arse for them for years, and, for my sins, I got put on the board recently, so I'm being sort of a grown-up for them now."

Her route into professional theatre seems relatively gentle. Her training was effectively at the Players drama society, while she was supposed to be in lectures. "I'm glad about that because I think it was a better way for me to learn about things, by doing them." She portrays herself as unacademic – she loved History of Art, her major subject, but found university English uninspiring. "I wasn't so great at English cause I didn't like taking things apart and putting it back together again and finding there was little pieces left over and maybe I didn't love it so much. I just didn't have the brain for it then."

Leaving college in the early 1980s, there simply wasn't anything to do, so it wasn't too big a deal to say to her parents she was going to give acting a go. Work in Dublin, at the Peacock, in London, and with Rough Magic, flowed pretty smoothly. Not that it's an easy profession:

"Actors are tough, you have to be. Because most of the time, unless you're making your own work, as an actor you have to wait for somebody else to want you to do something. Sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not.

"So you have to be a jack of all trades, you have to be able to do everything, radio work, stage work, film, whatever comes along... God bless advertising!"

In a briefly political interlude, she cites last year's Arts Council report on the acting profession. In 2004, it found, the average wage for a performer was €7,000 a year, with actors forced to take other work to subsidise their profession, "and yet most people said they still wouldn't change their job. Most people are happy with the job itself, cause it is really fulfilling". She catches herself: "Ooooohhh, did that smack of self- ... something-or-other, there?" Her faces jumps through a dozen exaggerated expressions, as if there's an internal dialogue going on about which side she's going to show in the interview, serious or funny. It's very entertaining. It also helps explain the permanently puzzled expression Ardal O'Hanlon wore as Dougal.

She catches herself talking seriously again, this time about The Taming of the Shrew – "oh God, I hope that doesn't sound a bit self regarding, or wanky, you know what I mean?"

The show sounds like great fun. Lynn Parker has a sure, sure touch – McLynn says she's the best director she's worked with – and, as McLynn describes it, they're ploughing rigorously through the text. "We don't want to cheat," she says, by grafting some trendy interpretation onto the play that isn't in the text.

"There is this idea that there's a big capitulation at the end by the Shrew's character. It's been appropriated by feminists over the years, people who put a slant on it, play it with some huge irony. I'd die if I thought there was a feminist whiff off it, because it's just not there."

It's being set in rural Ireland, with Irish accents ("it makes me believes Shakespeare was Irish, it works so well"). "It's all about 'the deal'," she says. "They're all farmers rolling into town looking for a wife... 'I'll take her off your hands, how much for that?'"

Her latest film is a very different kettle of fish. Gypo is a low-budget British movie about Roma gypsies seeking asylum in the UK, and McLynn is one of the three leading characters. The film is made according to the Dogme 95 rules, established in 1995 by a Danish collective to guide stripped-down filmmaking as an antidote to the Hollywood-dominated mainstream – Lars Von Trier has been its most successful exponent. McLynn loved it, especially the improvisation - "there's no script. We had a very definite script line, but there's no scripted dialogue" (this is one of the Dogme rules). Her character is "funny but also sort of tragic"; the film is "very elemental film making... Mike Leigh with a happier ending".

It's a far cry from her first days on location with Father Ted in the West, shivering as the crew tried to make a bristle from a sweeping brush stick to the wart they had just put on her face. (They failed. It was too cold, and the glue wouldn't hold it in place.)

We talk movies, ambition. She's "not really a very ambitious person", she says; she doesn't hold out a candle for Hollywood.

"I think now at my age..." She is 43. "I mean, I'm not a beautiful beanpole. As somebody said to me recently, you're 'mother material' now. But then again I was always mother material. When we were all starting off, if there was a granny or anything in it, I'd get that role."

And then she talks about her father. Less quickly, very frank, a bit less sure but still much to say. He had a massive stroke in the autumn, and lay in a coma for ten days with his family gathered around him.

"All the bits that made him him were gone."

Despite the awfulness, they "had ten great days laughing, celebrating him".

In the hospital, she took a call on her mobile. It was the producer for the British comedy duo, French and Saunders. Jennifer Saunders had written a new comedy series, and they wanted Pauline McLynn in the pilot. With Saunders, Dawn French, and Joanna Lumley. "You know, it's like, he-llo-oh!"

She is thrilled – "it's things like that that make you realise, you know, somebody has noticed what you're doing" – but perhaps not like she once would have been.

"Any other time, I would have got overexcited about it, but it's not really..." She tails off. "You can't live to work. When you see someone so brilliant, you know, dying...

"So, you know, it's fine. Sure, anything could happen to me between now and September, and if it does, that's fine too, you know, we'll deal with it.

"I don't get the death thing, don't see how it improves anybody's life. I say, if people want to live for ever with a good quality of life, let them." She pauses, reflective.

"I haven't figured that one out at all yet. Nor will I ever."

And then she's laughing again, promises to let me know if and when she does figure it out.

"Time passes so quickly. You just realise that, if at all possible, we should be moving on and hopefully doing no harm – 'leaving the footsteps only in the sand' – seeing as I'm not leaving any genetic material behind me at the rate I'm going, you know..." More knowing laughter and facial acrobatics. And then she's gone, paid the bill and run back to rehearsals. Back to being the Shrew.
More Rough Magic presents The Taming of the Shrew in the Project Theatre from 6-25 March. www.project.ie, 01 881 9613/14