‘Stones’ stars Conleth Hill, Seán Campion recall classic duos

By Joseph Hurley

The two performers who make up the cast of Belfast playwright Marie Jones’s shining, 15-character dramatic comedy, "Stones in His Pockets," have, since the play’s Broadway opening on April 1, been widely written about as though they were an antic team in the mold of, say, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

Such a comparison is both facile and incomplete. It is facile because the work Conleth Hill and Seán Campion are doing at the Golden Theatre is of a closeness and precision that recalls the great comedic pairs of the past.

But drawing parallels linking the lean and conspicuously agile Hill and the more compact and vaguely slower moving Campion with the beloved doubles of theatrical history tells only part of the tale.

The 36-year-old Hill, from Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, and Campion, 41, from Freshford, Co. Kilkennny, aren’t really a team, although they had worked together before their vibrant pairing in "Stones in His Pockets."

What they are, really, are superbly trained and seasoned actors, both of them having professional biographies that are so diverse and so impressive that it’s amazing that neither had ever performed in the United States until "Stones in His Pockets" began doing previews.

Hill and Campion, only a few days after the astounding reception they’d received from the city’s newspapers and from the play’s opening-night audience at the Golden, sat in the theater’s green room recently and talked about their work history.

Hill, sporting a fresh American haircut, recalled their initial meeting. "We met on a co-production by the Tinderbox Theatre and Field Day something more than two years ago," he said. "The play was Stewart Parker’s ‘Northern Star,’ "

Parker, a playwright from Northern Ireland, died young and is remembered by American audiences for "Spokesong," which was produced by the Circle-in-the-Square a couple of decades ago, and for "Pentecost," which was part of an Irish Festival at Washington’s Kennedy Center last year.

Hill, who was born on the north coast, only a few miles from Belfast, has a long history of work and friendship with Jones and her husband, the actor and director Ian McIlhinney, who has steered "Stones in His Pockets" from its earliest days, when, in a somewhat simpler form, it played brief runs in both Belfast and Dublin.

It was 1994, and the producer was the Dubbeljoint Theatre company, headed by a former Jones associate, Pam Brighton, a British lawyer and BBC producer who directed Jones’s "A Night in November," a one-actor play that ran in New York a couple of seasons ago.

In the Dubbeljoint staging of "Stones," Hill played Charlie Conlon, the part he’s now doing at the Golden. Playwright Jones, in fact, wrote the part with him in mind, and even identified Charlie’s hometown as Ballycastle.

In those early days, Jake Quinn, like Charlie an extra at work on an American film shooting in County Kerry, was played by actor Tim Murphy. Then, two years ago, when it became apparent that "Stones in His Pockets" might have a life beyond that Dubbeljoint staging, Jones and McElhinney, searching for a new Jake, asked Hill for suggestions, and he thought of Campion and that revival of "Northern Star."

While the bulk of Hill’s credits tend to be from theaters in Northern Ireland, much of Campion’s work has been done in Dublin, where he trained at the Focus Theatre, and where he’s lived for many years.

What "Stones in His Pockets" has become for Hill and Campion, who’ve done the show together for nearly two years, starting in Belfast in June 1999, is a well-oiled machine that, being consummate professionals, they’ve managed to keep running as smoothly as it did when they started, with no evidence of the rot that can so easily creep into performances after a long playing period.

Their teamwork is remarkable, and while theater lore is full of tales about costars who loathe each other and even try to booby trap a partner’s work, the fact that these actors are good friends seems to reflect their performances.

If they didn’t genuinely like each other, they’d never have done what they did during a period sandwiched between two long stints of "Stones," which was to appear at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, where both men are associate artists, in a production of "Waiting for Godot."

For an instant, Campion seemed unable to remember whether he’d played "Didi" or "Gogo" in the Beckett masterpiece, and he turned to his partner for clarification, as he might do in the event of a gaffe onstage. Hill rushed into the breach.

"You were Vladimir," he said, "and I was Estragon." Having done a play by Samuel Beckett can only, it would seem, contribute to the effectiveness of an actor’s work in "Stones in His Pockets," since, without being too sober about it, there could be said to be distinctly Beckettian aspects to Jones’s play, in both its antic surfaces and in the ambiguous darknesses lurking just below.

"The play was darker earlier on," the lanky and affable Campion said, tugging on his T-shirt, which had shrunk in the wash. "Among the things which got eliminated were a couple of characters connected with Sean, the boy addicted to drugs, who commits suicide, and a certain recurring note of ‘poor, suffering Ireland.’ It’s still there, just not as much."

The young character’s suicide gives the play both its darkest plot thread and its title, since he filled his pockets with stones to insure that his attempt to end his life by drowning would be successful.

Campion, one of eight sons and daughters of a Kilkenny bus driver, has directed plays by Beckett, including the thorny "Play" and the equally challenging "That Time," two of the Dublin-born immortal’s most difficult short works.

Hill, whose father worked as a BBC cameraman in Northern Ireland, has also made his mark as a writer, a point rather charmingly made in the actor’s Playbill biography with three simple words, "Conleth also writes."

Among the seemingly endless stream of Irish men and women who made the journey to New York to celebrate the "Stones" opening on April 1 were the mothers of both actors. Neither father, unfortunately, was considered well enough to make the trip.

Meanwhile, "Stones in His Pockets" continues at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End, with the New York cast’s replacements playing six times a week, while their stand-bys do two performances. For the time being, Hill and Campion plan to do all eight shows a week on Broadway.

The actors were playing the show for a month at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre, prior to coming to New York, when "Stones in His Pockets" won two Laurence Olivier Awards, the British equivalent of the American theater’s Tonys.

Jones’s play won for Best Comedy, and Hill took the prize as best actor. Campion knew three weeks in advance that his friend and partner had won, but he kept his promise not to let the cat out of the bag. When, on the BBC, he handed the prize to Hill after making the announcement, it must have been clear to both actors that the award had an arbitrary aspect, and that it was virtually impossible to attempt to honor Hill’s Charlie over Campion’s Jake, or the other way around.

The actors’ loose-limber, free-wheeling performances are the indivisible Yin and Yang of Jones’s lovely, intensely original little theater game.

Prizes are fine, but the stars’ job was to keep the play alive and breathing. In Toronto, with a month of sold-out houses, they were asked to do an additional performance each week.

"You couldn’t do nine performances a week of this play," Campion said. "You’d be on your knees."

Still, the intensity of the response "Stones in His Pockets" has received in Belfast, London, Dublin and now in New York, is what actors live for. "It’s terribly gratifying when you’re on the receiving end of it," Campion said.

"The main thing," Hill added, "is just to play the play and not expect anything. If it happens, it happens."

And it is happening, eight times a week, at the Golden Theatre, with every indication that it’s going to keep on happening for a long, healthy time to come.