Karl Shiels giving his all to 'fast and furious' Penelope

By Bernie Ní Fhlatharta

Karl Shiels loves what he does. He loves it so much that when he’s not doing it, he’s thinking about it. And when he does it, it has to be right.

The Dubliner is in Galway rehearsing for the Druid Theatre Company’s production Penelope, an Enda Walsh play directed by Mikel Murfi, that will be part of this year’s Galway Arts Festival, and he is loving every minute of the experience.

This is Karl’s first time appearing in a Druid production and indeed his first time in an Enda Walsh play. But he has been an admirer of the playwright’s work for years, particularly loving The Walworth Farce and Disco Pigs.

Penelope, a contemporary take on Homer’s Odyssey, is “fast and furious” in Karl’s words and a fantastic play that is a hilarious with a dark side.

“It has fantastic logic and I love that about it. Enda said he wrote the play with the actors for the four male characters in mind. One of them was me. There’s also a female character,” he says.

Karl has an acting CV as long as your arm, with an impressive list of stage, film and TV work, that doesn’t seem to tally with his thirty-something years but once he decided he wanted to act, it seems he fell from one job to another.

And he wasn’t always an actor. He is actually a qualified electrician but the draw of the boards was too much for him and in the early nineties he went to the Gaiety School of Acting to learn his craft, having first got the acting bug while still at secondary school.

He played drums in a band and was asked to play the drums in a panto. The rest is history and in 1999 he won the Best Actor Award at the Dublin Theatre Festival for his role in Comedians.

Karl’s film credits include Batman Begins where he played Cillian Murphy’s sidekick but it was duelling with actor Christian Bale on set that was really cool, he says.

He has worked alongside a host of stars including John Hurt (in Meeting Che Guevara and The Man from Maybury Hill) Cate Blanchett (in Veronica Guerin), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors) and the star studded cast of Batman Begins.

He had a shot at Hollywood, including meetings with director, Jerry Bruckheimer but they came to nothing when the Actors’ Union put a stop to non-American, non-members getting involved in the project in hand.

He says he has no regrets but he has worked in the US as Artistic Director of Semper Fi (Ireland) when he brought his production of Ladies and Gents to New York where the play was located in the public toilets in Central Park. There was a lot of red tape about that but it was worth it, he said.

He loves performing in unusual spaces but says there are no public toilets large enough in Galway for him to bring that play to the city.Karl is resourceful. During a dry patch for him and other Dublin based actors, he acquired a space in his native city and called it Theatre Upstairs which produced plays that were critically acclaimed, but that closed when the landlord decided to change the space into apartments.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.