Dawn Bradfield rates the work of Billy Roche so highly that she’d almost automatically accept a part in any of his plays. Not surprisingly therefore, when she got the script for his latest play Poor Beast in the Rain – which inspired The Guardian to describe Roche as “a natural dramatist who writes with compassion, wit and an uncanny feeling for mood and atmosphere” – and was offered a part, she immediately said “yes.”

Adding to her delight is the fact the production now playing at the Gate – albeit for a limited run – teams her with peers such as Liam Cunningham, Andrea Irvine and Don Wycherly, and is directed by a man she describes as “an actor’s director”, Conor McPherson. It doesn’t come any better than this. Better still is Dawn’s recent portfolio of work, which, apart from a yet-to-be-screened “TV thing called Pure Mule”, includes highly acclaimed Gate productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. If you were a baseball fan you could say that Dawn is on one hell of a home run!
“Things are going great, touch wood and, in fact, since I started in the business fourteen years ago I have been incredibly lucky when it comes to work,” says the Tony-nominated actress during a break from rehearsals for Roche’s play. “But Poor Beast in the Rain is, of course, part of Billy Roche’s Wexford Trilogy, and I play the girl who was abandoned ten years previously. I’m left in a betting shop with my father and it’s set on the weekend of the All-Ireland Hurling final when Danger Doyle, the guy who ran away with my mother, comes back to town to bring me back to the mother.
“That’s the core story. But the past few weeks we’ve been digging, digging into the characters. At first when you read the play you think ‘this is going to be easy, I just have to learn the lines and the play will play itself because it is so well written’ but then, because you are working with Conor, he’s so into asking questions and exploring and working things out, and that takes the play in a whole new direction. Other directors might not like to sit around a table for a week working at this level and, on the floor, trying things out, telling you, ‘be as mad as you want, as upset as you want or do nothing, whatever.’ So it’s a wonderful experience for all of us.”
Dawn is also full of praise for Billy Roche, who she once acted with in a London production of The Cavalcaders, saying that if he offered her a role in a play where all she had to say was “the lads are coming!” – as she did in her first role in John B. Keane’s The Man From Clare – she’d do it! “Because you know that with Billy you are going to get a story with a great background and heart,” she says.
“With Billy’s work what I’ve realised is that it’s all about the little details in the relationships between the people in a play,” she continues. “So my job here is to get across the story of this girl who has, yes, been left by her mother, but she’s also a bit of a rip around the town and she makes the decision to head off and be with the mother after ten years, so there are layers of feelings and nuances along those lines to explore.
“And even though, as I say, the first two weeks working on this were like a psychology test – where you look deeper and deeper inside your character, try to figure out why she would do this, say that, react in a certain way to the people she loves or hates – and that was really hard work and now we’re trying so hard to get the lines down, put it all together before opening night, I love it! Really. In fact, fourteen years after doing The Man From Clare I get as much of a buzz from acting and, in particular, from doing a play like Poor Beast in the Rain, as I ever did.”
Kinda makes you want to be an actor, doesn’t it?

Poor Beast In The Rain opens on April 12th at the Gate.