Over an acting career spanning decades, actor Stephen Rea has shown himself to be a versatile and prolific talent. With unprecedented access, the new RTÉ documentary Stephen Rea: The Fire in Me Now follows the veteran star as he rehearses Beckett’s legendary play Krapp's Last Tape in Dublin, playing opposite his younger self with audio tapes he recorded over a decade ago - watch now, via RTÉ Player.
We travel with him, from where he grew up in north Belfast, to his family home north of Dublin, to London’s Maida Vale where he spent time as an actor and to his beloved Donegal.
Director John O'Rourke introduces Stephen Rea: The Fire in Me Now below.
Past midnight. Never knew such silence…
It was around a little wooden table, on Cruit Island, just off Donegal, that I first really saw the sparks fly. Stephen Rea sat before us, almost completely motionless, channeling his performance of the title character of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. The previous year he had brought this production to both the Project and the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, and now he was preparing to take Krapp and his tapes and bananas on a worldwide tour.
Stephen is one of the very few actors still with us who worked closely with Beckett. The Irish dramatist was well known for obsessing over the performances in his work of some of the finest actors of the twentieth century — Jack MacGowran, Billie Whitelaw, Pat Magee, Buster Keaton. In 1976, Stephen played the role of Clov in Endgame in a London production closely supervised by Beckett. During the rehearsal period, Beckett gave his young compatriot one or two little notes that have ended up shaping the entire career of a man now widely recognised as one of Ireland’s greatest actors.
Shortly after Stephen worked with Beckett, he founded the theatre company Field Day with Brian Friel, began his close working relationship with Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, and was soon nominated for an Oscar in Jordan’s breakout hit The Crying Game. This all came at a huge turning point in Irish society, when the iron grip of the Catholic Church, the trauma of the Troubles, and a torpid economy were all giving way to a new generation. A generation of which Stephen Rea was in the vanguard.
This lifetime of monumental achievements was at the forefront of my mind as I watched Stephen become Krapp once more for our documentary cameras. On the days leading up to this, we had filmed him on the Belfast streets where he had grown up in the wake of the second world war, or with Eamonn McCann in Derry’s Guildhall, talking about Bloody Sunday and its impact on both them and Brian Friel. But now we were in the pitch black of the Atlantic coast, recreating the final moments of Beckett’s one-man masterpiece, as Krapp listens back to a tape he had made many years before.
reuniting with director Hugo Blick in 2022 for The English
Stephen himself, with characteristic foresight, had taped the play’s pre-recorded lines over a decade earlier. He knew that the voice had to sound much younger than the man we meet on stage, and so he ensured that the option was there for him to bring Krapp to life, if the opportunity ever arose. We selected the final passage of the play for Stephen, as Krapp, to listen back to now, with its redolent lines "Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now."
As the tape (or more accurately, the well-hidden smartphone) played and Stephen transformed into Krapp, purely through the simple act of listening, our four-person crew felt the air quicken. All of a sudden, we had a title for our documentary. How apposite, for a man born on Halloween, the night of lost souls and Jack O’Lanterns, to remind our audience that this great performer’s powers remain undimmed, that he still has the fire within him now.
Stephen Rea: The Fire In Me Now, RTÉ One, Thursday 10 April @ 10.15pm - catch up afterwards via RTÉ Player
