Playgirl of the Western World

Winner of Best Supporting Actress at the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for her performance in Titus Andronicus, critically acclaimed for her role in Breakfast on Pluto, Ruth Negga is one of the new stars of Irish stage and screen. By Donald Mahoney

In a pub on Abbey Street, after a day's rehearsal, Ruth Negga is approached every 15 minutes or so by a well-wisher. Her performance in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto is still fresh in many minds, and Negga takes every plaudit, every congratulatory word with genuine warmth. She has not been spoiled by her short, if snowballing, success. With two plays currently in production in the Abbey Theatre, the pub is abuzz with the chatter of garrulous, thirsty actors. Quietly elegant in a black top and knee-length skirt, Negga herself remains inconspicuous.

While Ruth Negga has been one of the brighter new lights in the somewhat cloistered Dublin acting community for a few years, appearing in a spate of plays and an RTÉ mini-series, Love is the Drug, the world outside Ireland is beginning to take notice. Following her role as Charlie beside Cillian Murphy's cross-dressing vamp in Pluto, she was selected to represent Ireland as one of Europe's "Shooting Stars" at last weekend's Berlin Film Festival.

Her future is a regular point of discussion in 'bright young things' actor chat, but Negga doesn't seem particularly concerned about what is to come, and instead revels in the cosy camaraderie of Dublin's acting community. Emigration is still a reality for Irish actors, and Negga, with an agent in London and Dublin, is ready for whatever comes next.

Negga, an only child, was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she lived until she was four years old. Her mother, from Limerick, was working in Ethiopia as a nurse when she met Negga's father. When the time came to go home, Ruth's father wasn't allowed to leave Ethiopia, so Ruth and her mother came back to Ireland on their own, where she enjoyed what seems like a normal Irish childhood in the suburbs of Limerick.

Ethiopia remains close to Negga, and she has been back subsequently. "The poverty in Ethiopia is all-consuming", she says. "You can smell it. You can feel it."

Her own emigration from Ethiopia historically coincides with Bob Geldof's journey there. While sceptics may decry Geldof's attachment to Africa as massive ego rub, Negga is unequivocal in her admiration for the work he has done in forcing attention to the continent's plight.

"We can't afford to be cynical anymore", she says. "We can't afford to sit back in our middle-class homes and watch TV and give out about what people like Geldof are doing when there are people dying like they are there."

It is with pride that Negga considers herself an Irish actress. And though there aren't a glut of great roles for Irish actresses, paradoxically, for a mixed-race woman like Negga, there's something artistically liberating in the roles available to her here. "For instance, I don't have to worry about being stereotyped here because there's no roles for mixed race characters in Ireland. It's always happening to me in Britain all the time because those roles exist there."

She speaks proudest of her role as Pegeen Mike in the Druid's production of The Playboy of the Western World that toured Australia in 2004. Not only did she have the honour of receiving direction from Garry Hynes, but she had the opportunity to put her own self into one of Irish theatre's most iconic roles.

Although Negga was trained at Trinity's Samuel Beckett Centre and has performed on stage in solemn epics like Antigone and Titus Andronicus, it was the emotive pull of Hollywood tear-jerkers that first aroused her interest in acting. "I was seven, and it was watching movies like Never Dead, or Beaches, or even The Bodyguard with my cousins", she says, growing more animated as she remembers. "And I don't even think that I liked those movies. But it was just the idea that people actually did this, or that I could do this."

And while Negga is quite content to rhapsodise about power of Hollywood, she has never been to America, and doesn't seem bowled over by the thought of enduring obscurity in Hollywood in order to make her name. When discussing the drive of bit actors portrayed in programmes like Ricky Gervais' Extras, Negga says "it's either fierce dedication that keeps them going, or complete innocence and naïvete, or complete and utter stupidity. It's one of the three". For her part, she readily admits the role of luck and "being in the right place at the right time" in her own success.

Work for a theatre actor in a small city like Dublin can be gruelling. As Negga, arms weary from a day's pole-vaulting following rehearsals for Conall Morrison's physically engaging The Bacchae of Baghdad which premieres at the Abbey in early March, will tell you, "anyone who thinks the acting life is glamorous should come to a rehearsal space and see us huddled up together drinking our tea. The pay is shit for theatre actors, and it's tough, you know. It's complete and utter engagement again and again and again. Mentally, physically, and emotionally".

But Negga has never considered a career other than acting, and she speaks zealously about the adrenaline rush that comes over her once the red curtain is pulled. "I think actresses seem larger than life because they're so used to being in complete connection with themselves. Acting requires you to be totally and utterly alive."

When the conversation turns to future projects, Negga is cagey. She admits she's been considering future projects, but gives nothing away, while admitting "someone told me once to always say there's something in the works, even when there isn't". But Negga doesn't seem the least bit burdened by thought of the future. Appreciative of where she's come from and what she's already achieved, for Ruth Negga, the future is full of possibility.