Only when I laugh
From star cameos in cult TV shows to writing sell-out plays and award-winning films, Mark Doherty’s talent has never been sated with success in just one medium. An honorary Dún Laoghaire resident and House regular, Tommy Tiernan’s favourite comedian talks stand-up, star turns and Forty Foot swims.
How do you define a polymathic talent like Mark Doherty? A stand-up comedian, an actor, a writer, a Dún Laoghaire local and Haddington House regular (Oliveto is his family’s favourite restaurant), he can also be heard regularly on radio, his dulcet tones making honey of any copywriter’s marketing message. For those less familiar with his work, he has appeared in movies from Breakfast on Pluto to Ondine to The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. If he is already familiar to you, it’s probably most recently through lead roles in Amy Huberman’s comedy Finding Joy and Alison Spittle’s Nowhere Fast. His turn as the parish priest in three series of Chris O’Dowd’s Moone Boy is pure TV gold.
But these mainstream successes belie a much more avant garde centre. The son of noted Irish jazz musician and pianist Jim Doherty, he grew up in a Dublin household that was definitely not your average 1970s monoculture, producing both Mark and his younger brother, the equally talented Irish comedian and writer David O’Doherty. It was in stand-up comedy where Mark initially employed his creativity while in college, cutting his comedic teeth and honing his writing skills at places like the International Bar in Dublin’s city centre. Though he pursued it full time for just a few years, his success was marked, becoming something of a cult figure. To this day he remains Irish comedian and actor Tommy Tiernan’s favourite stand-up.
Other disciplines were drawing him out though, and while continuing to add to his acting credentials with things like Unwrapped with Miranda Hart for the BBC and Time Trumpet with Armando Iannucci, by 2004 he had completed his first major play, Trad. First directed by Mikel Murfi for Galway Arts Festival, it went on to appear at the Perth and Adelaide Theatre Festivals, the Edinburgh Theatre Festival and at the Bush Theatre, London. It was recently revived for a national tour, starting off in the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. “It became this play that I’d like to think I imagined all the way along”, reflects Mark, “but it became what it became in the end because of a great collaboration, making it better than it was. That’s a really rare thing.”
And in typical style, he followed this success not with another play but with a film, A Film With Me In It to be precise, starring, as the title suggests, himself, along with his brother David and fellow stand-up and actor Dylan Moran. He wrote and starred in the production, with the film going on to be nominated for six Irish Film and Television Awards, including Best Film, Best Actor and Best Screenplay, and winning the Special Jury Prize at the 28th International Istanbul Film Festival. Not bad for something which wrapped in 20 days. “There was quite a lot of responsibilities on me,” he recalls, somewhat understatedly. “After 20 days of that I was kind of ready for the madhouse, or at least a good lie-down.”
The film has become something of a cult classic in Ireland too, being described as “Withnail and I reworked by Joe Orton”. Again, he didn’t even attempt to repeat its success, instead delving into more TV and writing work, all the while continuing a particularly fruitful writing partnership with Irish comedian Barry Murphy. “We’ve been through periods where we’ve written very closely. It’s unusual to have someone that you trust so much.”
For now, his focus is on a writing project of his own, and also an adaptation for film, which neatly brings us back to the neighbourhood, and the House’s closest swimming spot, the Forty Foot.
At Swim, Two Boys is a novel by Irish writer Jamie O’Neill set in the year 1915 to 1916 and tells the story of two young boys falling in love against the backdrop of the Easter Rising. Adapting the 700-page book for the screen has had its challenges, but also its rewards, says Mark. “It’s a beautiful merging of that story against the political upheaval of the time. It’s an absolutely stunning book, a proper work of art.”
With much of the action taking place at the Forty Foot, it has helpfully allowed him to plumb his own local knowledge.
“It’s great that I live up the road and know every lamppost that they are talking about.” A regular swimmer there, you can usually find him diving in headfirst at full tide around six in the evening – a pleasure that never loses its allure. “It’s not even the swimming,” he offers, “it’s the exhilaration, the beautiful shock to the system as you hit the freezing water. There is no greater reminder that you are alive than that.” A stop-off at Oliveto after is the final cherry on top. “I actually don’t want much more in life than that really.”