Now that my life’s work, a five-hour, three-part play based on the life and works of Flann O’Brien is nearing completion, I wanted to make contact with you. I have spent a lifetime working in Celtic and Gaelic theatre, and as you know Flann O’Brien was a Gaelic speaker and very well versed in the old myths and history. It has taken me three years to complete the play, and all that time I have had it in mind as a suitable vehicle for your immense talent. In fact my admiration for you goes right back to the film about a crippled Dublin lad, Christy, I think his name was. In your more recent film, There Will Be Blood, oil spouting everywhere, you were positively elemental. In a long career I don’t believe I have ever encountered an actor with such emotional intensity. What you have done, which so few actors have achieved, is to harness a huge inner power, while doing very little to attract attention. (As my colleague Kenneth Tynan once said of the young Richard Burton.)

Now, to the project I mentioned – nearing completion – a life of Flann O’Brien using his own novels as the starting point. Two versions are proposed, a five-hour three-part play – to run on consecutive nights – partly in Erse with rolling subtitles (a trick I have learned from Jonathan Kent’s Japanese Hamlet) and a feature film with yourself playing the part of Flann.

As you know, he was a wonderful, protean character, brought up speaking the Gaelic as I said, and steeped in the romance of ancient legend, but keenly aware, from his seat in the snug of the Red Swan, of the parodic possibilities of the Gaelic nostalgia. He was also one of the few great Irish writers of his time who never left Ireland, at that time a repressed and dreary place. Now of course people are making the reverse journey. You, I believe, are one of those who were nurtured by the Home Counties of England, like me. I was born in Blackheath, London SE3.