The Pluck of the Irish

Except for the scenic route taken from the airport by their limo driver and an inspiring visit to Ellis Island, Sean Campion and Conleth Hill still haven't seen much of New York City. And since this is their first visit to the U.S., they're a bit overwhelmed. That is not to say the place is entirely new to them. "You're so familiar with the city from movies and TV that you feel like you've been here before," says Campion. Adds Hill: "All my terms of reference for New York are television. Where would Rhoda and Brenda have lived? Where would Seinfeld have lived?"

Fittingly, the play that has brought these two little-known Irish actors to Broadway, Stones in His Pockets, explores the flip side of their situation--the disruptive effect on a small Irish town when a big Hollywood film crew sets up shop. The play, a sellout hit in London and winner of the Olivier Award for best comedy of last year, has arrived in New York with its production virtually unchanged. That includes, most crucially, Campion and Hill in the leading--and only--roles. They play two locals working on the film as extras, as well as (a gimmick born of economic necessity when the play was first staged in Belfast) every other character, from the diva-like Hollywood star and harried assistant director to an assortment of townspeople, like the boozy old codger who's the last surviving extra from John Wayne's The Quiet Man.

On one level, the play is a wee thing. The first act spends most of its time making spirited fun of the culture clash between the Hollywood phonies and the Irish yokels. In Act II the piece deepens, as a drug-troubled youth who has been rejected from the movie (and by the star he idolizes) drowns himself, a tragedy that raises, without a great deal of huffing and puffing, the dark side of Hollywood's dream factory. The play's real triumph, though, is the showcase it provides for the breathtaking virtuosity of Campion and Hill. They slide in and out of some 15 characters so deftly (a stoop here, a thrust-out chest there) and with such mutual precision that you feel you're watching not 15 people onstage, or even two, but one actor with two interlocking, constantly morphing sets of body parts.

Belfast playwright and actress Marie Jones based the play on her own encounters with Hollywood (she played Daniel Day-Lewis' mother in In the Name of the Father) and those of her husband--also the play's director--Ian McElhinney, who has had bit roles in such films as Michael Collins. The blarney-filled Hollywood romance being filmed in the play bears some resemblance to Far and Away (which starred those Irish favorites Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), but Jones insists she isn't skewering any single movie or star but simply trying to show what happens "when the wagon rolls in, with all the glitz and glamour, and two cultures that are poles apart coexist for six weeks."

She wrote the play for Hill, who co-starred in an early version staged in Belfast in 1994. Campion was recruited later when the play was remounted at Belfast's Lyric Theater in May 1999. The two actors have been joined at the hip ever since, as the play traveled to Dublin and Edinburgh and eventually to London's West End. (During one break, they co-starred as the tramps in Waiting for Godot. What's Irish for "busman's holiday"?) Hill, 36, the pudgy, cherub-faced one, grew up in Ballycastle, on the northeast coast. Campion, 41, the angular, rugged-looking fellow, hails from County Kilkenny in the southeast. Together they have more than three decades of stage work under their belt, though neither, oddly, ever landed a movie-extra job. Hill did pick up some work as an extra for British TV in the '80s, a job he liked because you got "danger pay" for playing a soldier or policeman. "When the Troubles were at their height, it was considered dangerous," he says. "You wore big yellow BBC plaques at the top of your uniform just to make sure, if there were any potential snipers, they wouldn't mistake you."

It bothers Hill that politics is still expected to be central to drama that comes out of Northern Ireland. "All we've ever wanted to do in the North was tell our own story in our own way," he says. "But it's not sexy enough to be having struggles in your life that weren't political." Campion has his own beefs about the way Ireland is portrayed onscreen. "You like to think if people are doing a project they have a responsibility to be accurate," he says. "It isn't a huge amount to ask." Stones in His Pockets is at least one step in the right direction. So far, anyway. A production company in Britain, alas, is already making plans to turn it into a movie.