All is calm and quiet on a weekday morning inside the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London. The stage is bare, the ornate chandeliers hang low. Then Pauline McLynn bursts in, having abandoned her taxi in traffic and hurried the rest of the way on foot. Her brown hair is pinned up, save for a few stray tendrils. Accepting a drink from a nearby publicist, she launches immediately into a monologue about the importance of wax exports to the Ethiopian economy. It is entirely possible that she takes a breath over the course of the next hour, though I couldn’t swear to it.
The effect is to draw the listener instantly into her confidences. Within minutes of settling down in the pews of the London theatre, she has made me feel we go way back. It was in this theatre, adjacent to Shakespeare’s Globe, that she appeared last year in a raucous production of the 17th-century meta-comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle. This month, she is starring here in Cymbeline. I confess that I’m not familiar with the play. “I wasn’t. But I feel now it’s a bit of a neglected masterpiece. It’s got laughter, tears, frights, a big battle, a poisoning. All sorts. I’m married to the king and I want his daughter to marry my son, only she’s not so keen. We meet everyone as the shit hits the fan. To use a Shakespearean phrase.”
McLynn, 53, is quick to dispel the impression that there has been any plan to her career. “I’m not a woman with a great trajectory in mind,” she says. “I might be dangerous if I were. Things occur and you go, ‘I’ll do that.’”
This easygoing approach has led to countless stage appearances and various stints on big TV series (she was Yvonne, flinty wife of Nick Cotton, in EastEnders, and Libby, the narcoleptic librarian in Shameless). As well as this, she has written 10 novels. These include two young adult books, three “capers” about the female private eye Leo Street, and the novel of which McLynn is proudest – The Time Is Now, which drops in on the past, present and future residents of one Soho address.
She will for ever be known, though, as Mrs Doyle, the sandwich-making, tea-foisting, busybody housekeeper in the sitcom Father Ted. Twenty years on, there has been no noticeable abatement in the attention she receives. “Rarely a day goes by when someone doesn’t mention it. Offers of cups of tea and such.” It would be remiss of me not to check what she’s drinking today, I tell her, and she raises her cup with a reassuring smile: “It’s tea.”
McLynn is in no hurry to distance herself from the part. After all, she did dub the knitted tea cosies that she sells online the Go Ons, after Mrs Doyle’s catchphrase (“Ah, go on, go on, go on”). It’s just that the show’s fans can be a touch over-excitable. “They can’t stop themselves shouting out,” she cringes. “First of all, I’m not deaf. Secondly, now everyone’s looking at me. I know I spend most of my life showing off in front of people, but not in the street.”
That idea of acting as showing off is one to which she returns several times. She thinks her parents spotted early on that she had a liking for it when she was growing up in Galway. “But neither of them ever said to me, ‘How are you going to make a living out of this?’” McLynn would entertain her mother by doing impressions of her teachers. “One time I made her laugh so hard, she did a bit of a sick on her cardie.”
The peculiarity of McLynn’s success as the ageing Mrs Doyle was that she was only 30 when she landed the role. Older actors had auditioned, but none had quite nailed the mix of aggressive hospitality, plangent disappointment and extravagant lunacy. “I nearly didn’t go for it,” she says. “I’d had a bad chicken sandwich the night before.” She is reluctant, even after the show’s success, to accept much credit for her detailed, demented performance. “You’d have to be the worst actor in the world not to succeed with what Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews wrote. They understood she was the archetypal granny or mammy. Wherever you go, you’ll always meet a Mrs Doyle.”
Lately, though, she’s been getting cast younger than her age. “Libby in Shameless was 42. And I was in East Is East on stage earlier this year. I took to pointing out to everyone that my character was 46 in the text.”
If there’s an area she still longs to explore, in her acting and her novels, it’s the dark side. “I’d like to try writing something horrible. It’s funny as much as anything. Like when I was on EastEnders. Oh, the misery! Everyone fighting with one another. I find it hilarious. It’s like Shakespeare.”
She seems perfectly content with the idea that she will always be associated with comedy. “I do think a lot about what we leave behind. Myself and my husband don’t have kids and I wonder, ‘Who’s even going to want photos of us?’ There’ll be bits of me left, obviously, because Father Ted will always be on. But I’d be just as happy to leave behind a laugh or a smile in a corner somewhere. For people to know that there was once happiness here.” She gestures around us at the empty theatre. “That could be my imprint on time.”
- Cymbeline is at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 21 April. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
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