My first sight of TP McKenna was in the Abbey pantomime during which, each Christmas, the company clowned around in Irish. My schoolmates and I hung over the balcony of the gods in the Queen’s Theatre to ogle this manly, delectable Prionsa, while at the same time seeming to address each one of us personally, up there in our eyrie.
By 1965, when I joined the Abbey myself, he was semi-detached from it, intent on forging a career on the commercial stage, particularly in London. But he was about a good deal.
I was hanging around with Sinead Cusack at the time and one night he drove the two of us home to her family house in Dalkey. For the next hour we literally wept with mirth as he related the story of his birth in Mullagh, using an imaginary flipchart and pointer to illustrate dashes across rushy fields by midwives and the exclamations from locals when they finally glimpsed the magnificence of his baby physique.
And that night I sensed correctly that he had chosen me as a friend.
TP had an unparalleled talent for lasting and loyal friendship. Over the years, however, as I got to know him well, I discovered his somewhat bombastic exterior hid boundless kindness and generosity but also a penchant for deep worry. Worry about money, about his fours sons and his daughter, about the fortunes of the British Labour Party, of which he was a member; worry about his voice, his hair, his weight, his career, his friends, worry that he’d never get another job.
He worried about his capped teeth. Once while performing in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, he shouted the line ‘STOP!’ – and out flew one of these front caps, to land at the feet of another actor.
He worried about his nose, which Ernest Blythe told him was too long, along with this advice: ‘You’ll just to face the audience when you’re playing love scenes so they won’t notice!’
And he worried constantly about his health, and during a New Year’s Day party in his home in Finchley one year, on looking around at his 35 guests, realised that there were only four actors present. The others were doctors, chemists, orthopaedic surgeons, psychiatrists – ‘my support group!’
He did have a great sense of the absurd, though. At one point he became so panicked at the thought of leaving his safe, secure job at the Abbey for the thronged shark pools of theatrical London – and inflicting the move on his family too – he sought psychiatric help. But coming in for one appointment, he found his psychiatrist at the desk, head dolefully in his hands. ‘How are you?’ asked the patient.
‘Terrible.’ Pause
‘Oh, by the way,’ the medic looked up, ‘How are you?’
TP said he ‘laughed all the way back to the bus’ – and didn’t go back.
His father, Ralph, was Michael Collins’s intelligence officer for the North Meath Brigade.
TP himself, born in 1929, was the eldest of Ralph’s 12 children and by the common custom in large families at the time, was sent nightly to sleep elsewhere, in his case across to his step-grandmother’s house.
This woman, Anna, was from Louisiana. She had fallen in love during correspondence with his grandfather, a widower, and had sailed across the Atlantic to live with him in Mullagh.
It was in that house, by the soft light of paraffin lamps, the child TP first entered an imaginary world, teeming with character as this Southern belle read to him the works of Henry James and Dickens. Sent to boarding school in Cavan, he revelled in the school shows.
And when the pupils were brought to hear the great Anew McMaster, who was playing one of his touring productions nearby, the boy was ecstatic and decided this was the life for him.
McMaster kindly granted him a personal audience but then he told him never to think about becoming an actor until he was absolutely certain there was nothing else in the world that he could do. Chastened (‘set me back eight years!’) our hero shelved his ambitions and on leaving school joined the Granard branch of the Ulster Bank and – oh joy! – eventually got to Dublin where he instantly joined the Shakespeare Society, the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society and any other group he could find, while trying to convince himself that he was having the best of both worlds.
Until, in 1954, he failed his banking exams.
A transfer to Killeshandra, where there was one weekly bus to the outside world, beckoned.
He resigned and at the instigation of his new friend, Milo O’Shea, took a part in the tiny Pike theatre at £2 a week. That was the start of it.
In 1972, with his stage and burgeoning film and television career based in London, his wife, May White, from Durrow in Co.Laois agreed to move across with the couple’s children.
He always said May never left Ireland. He probably didn’t either, always keeping a base here and making sure to retain contact, but in a sense, we took him for granted, even by reference to his name.
Here it was ‘TP’s in a new play’, as though he had only recently left the building, or the barn, whereas in London it was a more respectful: ‘I hear TP McKenna’s in it!’
In London restaurants, even on the streets, he turned heads, and it wasn’t just because they could hear him over the crash of crockery or the roar of traffic. They recognised him. They knew his name.
In my opinion, this was not just because of the Lovejoys, the Avengers, the Doctor Whos of the Sweeneys – or even the movies: Charge of the Light Brigade, Shake Hands With The Devil, The Girl With The Green Eyes or Straw Dogs. It was because of something indefinable called stature.
Resigned that he would never become what is termed a ‘leading man’, he was nevertheless the quintessential ‘actor’s actor’, highly respected in the profession at all levels including that of the English ‘Sirs’.
His presence in a stage play, even if not playing a lead, sold tickets and attracted confreres.
And a few years ago he was astonished, but highly chuffed, to be invited to spend the weekend with Prince Charles and Camilla at Sandringham which gave rise to a flush of new and fabulous stories about folded underwear, washed cars and special masses laid on for Catholics.
We last spoke about four months ago, when he telephoned me.
‘You know you can do better than this’ was always his ‘advice’ to me and along with all those privileged to experience his humour, his loyalty - and yes, his fretting – I shall miss him greatly.
His final resting place will be beside May in the small Mullagh cemetery where the McKennas have lain in peace since 1795.
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