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Trips to the Abbey as a teenager yielded a draw towards stage acting, the core of the appeal being the capacity to temporarily become someone else, be it the absurd Captain Boyle from O’Casey’s Juno and the Peacock , or a grave ancient Greek. He marvelled at the contract of performance, with an audience agreeing to fall for the magical transformation, just for a spell. The way his comedic career flows out of his very early passion makes Rosenstock’s journey seem easy, a matter of pulling in the oars and floating where talent and opportunity might carry him. Yet we can see decisive moves on his part. He became fascinated with Trinity for one reason, and that was Players. Operating out of the front square, it had a reputation for being the best in the city, and was taken seriously by critics. He enrolled and studied economics and politics, but the true workload was the acting, which planted him in the cast of at least 15 plays. Through a lens of the present, this pre-mobile phone era seems enviably analogue – when an agent sought to sign him up, the former left him a letter on the Players notice board. So now he was a young actor, with an agent, living in Dublin. ‘Going for pints in the Dawson Lounge, talking about doing the latest Sam Shepard play. It was a little bit pretentious but utterly brilliant.’ The Trinity years saw him fall in love with the juicy satires that carry the force of their joke in the title. West Brit Story was a musical take on Irish social strata. He played the ‘Southsider,’ singing odes to a Northside girl called ‘Concepta’. William Congreve’s Way of the World would see them clear the awards at ISDA one year. Brian Friel’s Translations , which celebrated the Irish language his uncle Gabriel is a living master of, was another serious number, but the inevitable drift was towards the comic take. Languishing in a post-college lull, the break came via a flatmate who worked at Radio Ireland. She heard him doing his impressions about the house. ‘She just said, “Do you want to come in and do these on the radio?”’ The relationship with what became Today FM continues to this day. As the years have gone by, Mario has picked up the voices of whoever is foremost in our mental eyes and ears – it is hard to imagine a crop of politicos he couldn’t take on. Back in the absurdly-rich 90s, the ongoing peace process made dark humour inevitable. A mash-up of the Good Friday crew and Star Trek saw Adams and McGuinness fly around the universe on the ‘Starship Compromise,’ looking for dialogue with different species. This is where Mario insists he ‘doesn’t write comedy’ – but original ideas nevertheless float near the surface. The Sinn Fein/ Star Trek crossover being one. ‘They didn’t want to fight them and they didn’t want to kill them either. And they wouldn’t back down.’ This is where Rosenstock’s story blends into the early days of some of the best creators in Irish comedy: Scrap Saturday , Dermot Morgan, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, the last of whom would write a unique part for the actor, as Roy Keane in an Ancient-Romanised allegory of Ireland’s World Cup debacle in Japan. Actors Owen Roe and Pauline McLynn shared the same agency, and he was in awe of ( Father Jack ) Frank Kelly; yet it was Morgan who shone as an inspiration, spawning the Hip Priest character who would become Father Ted. On the creators of that show, he sees the writing of Linehan and Mathews at their best as being ‘up there with Flann O’Brien’ and in the same tradition of Irish absurdism. Unlike Brian O’Nolan however, ‘…they’re not dead. They’ll never be talked about until they die.’ Amid such a symphony of praise, what about a trickier question: How does he see the controversy around Linehan, whose stand-up set was cancelled at Edinburgh 2023, along with the entire show hosting it? ‘I find it disappointing. I find this a grim indictment of the culture wars, which are crystallised at their most pernicious through the trans debate, which just seems to have brought out the worst in everybody. Graham Linehan is one of Ireland’s finest comic writers. Why is he getting involved in throwing expletives at people online that he doesn’t even know? Where’s the good in that? Similarly, what good is it for somebody to cancel Graham? You should not cancel comedy performances. I think that the people who are cancelling Graham Linehan don’t even want to cancel him. They’re doing it because they think they’ll get cancelled if they don’t. People end up doing things they don’t even believe in anymore, just not to be beaten up. Whether you have a dog in the fight or not, you’ll get beaten up if you don’t agree with the right side… and not only agree, you must post online, show us that you are clean. That you are pure, you know?’ It is an animated actor who completes this monologue, waving a pointing finger in the guise of (some sort of) bully. Nevertheless, he concludes that he ‘thinks it’s a shame that Graham has fought and died on this hill. His place in the world is making people laugh, not fighting with some numpty online. I feel sorry for him.’ The last line we walk is another angle: As someone who found his direction so young, what would he say to his younger self? ‘You’re talking too much. You need to shut up and listen. The more you listen, the more you will learn.’ On that last note, we wind up the conversation looking both far back to his time in Trinity and into the near future. As much as he weaves gold around those educational years, he knows a bit more humility might have led him to an even richer repertoire of voices. As he prepares for another stage show, lining up with what may be an interesting general election in our republic, one hopes his full range of inner voices will rise up, singing, when we most need them.
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The Trinity Centre for the Book Mark Faulkner, Director at the Trinity Centre for the Book shares how this inspiring Centre is celebrating Trinity’s diverse collections and expertise by delving into the profound influence of books on education, culture, and society T rinity is famous the world over for the Book of Kells, with over 600,000 visitors a year coming to see the world’s most famous medieval manuscript. But this luminous codex is just one, albeit magnificent, element of Trinity’s collections of books and manuscripts. These collections are, uniquely, coupled with a concentration of research expertise on the history of the Book that is unparalleled on the island of Ireland. It was recognition of these distinctive strengths that led to the establishment of the new Trinity Centre for the Book, launched by the Provost in the Old Library in April this year. The Centre grows out of a conviction that the Book is one of society’s most important technologies. Through its use of image, layout and the written word, it has played a key role in communicating knowledge and lived experience across time and place for millennia. Learning to read, and to interact with books, is a key part of education, from the toddler read to by a parent, the primary school student learning their letters in first class, to university students and adult learners grappling with elaborate presentations of complex data. Writing continues to evolve, as the development of new non-alphabetic symbols like emojis and the emergence of AI-driven content generation engines like ChatGPT shows. We believe that contemporary society cannot be fully understood or bettered without an understanding of the function, status and potential of the Book as a tool for social organisation and development. Trinity is an obvious place to foreground the Book’s importance. Trinity’s collections are exceptionally wide ranging, spanning millennia, and include over 600 medieval manuscripts, as well as hundreds of books from the earliest phase of printing and reach all the way to the present day, with librarians accessioning digital records of life in lockdown Trinity makes a 13th-century masterpiece globally accessible during COVID-19. They encompass internationally significant specialist collections, like the Pollard Collection of Children’s Books and the 18th-century Dutch Fagel family library, alongside archives of major authors like Samuel Beckett and important publishers like the Cuala Press. Trinity is also home to the UK Legal Deposit collection for Ireland, and is an Irish Legal Deposit Library. These deep collections – more than six million printed volumes in total – mean there is exceptional scope for groundbreaking research on the Book. Trinity’s researchers also have unparalleled expertise in this work, producing over a thousand books and articles on the Book in the last ten years. This expertise encompasses conservators, archivists, librarians and digital photographers, who, in the Library, research, preserve and share the collections with readers from across the world. It also includes academic staff across English, Art History, Modern Languages, Classics, History, Religions, Education, and Computer Science, plus students, undergraduate, masters and PhD’s across these disciplines, many of whom conduct research on the Library’s collections as part of their studies. Books and book-making are also a key part of Trinity’s inclusivity and widening participation strategies, especially through the Trinity Access Programmes’ Bookmarks project, where primary school children produce their own books with expert help. This track record and collective expertise makes Trinity a world-leader in the field of the history of the Book.
