The Ginger Man (Ashcroft, Croydon), Lindsay Anderson's revival of Julius Caesar (1964) for the English Stage Company and 1965 as the Burglar (Aubrey "Popsy" Bagot) in Shaw's Too True to be Good (Garrick) opposite Alistair Sim and George Cole. He had not left the Irish stage behind entirely however and would make regular appearances at the Dublin Theatre Festival in A Little Winter Love, Pull Down A Horseman, King of the Castle and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He joined Stuart Burge's company at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968 playing Trigorin in The Seagull and Sir Joseph Surface in Sheridan's The School For Scandal, both directed by Jonathan Miller. In 1969 he created the role of Fitzpatrick in David Storey's The Contractor directed by Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court Theatre, London. The production later transferred to the Fortune Theatre and ran for over a year. In 1973 he took on the role of Andrew Wyke opposite his friend Donal Donnelly in the Irish premiere of Peter Shaffer's Sleuth. The production played to acclaim at the Opera House, Cork, and at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin where it broke box office records. Later that year he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and took over the role of Robert Hand in James Joyce's only play, Exiles directed by Harold Pinter. In the same season he also appeared in a rare staging of Jean Genet's The Balcony directed by Terry Hands. He returned to the RSC in 1976 for Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, directed by Jack Gold in a production to mark the American bicentennial celebrations, as the revolutionary pastor Reverend Anthony Anderson. In the late 1980s and 1990s he returned to the Dublin stage when he was invited by director Michael Colgan to join the Gate Theatre on a number of occasions including admired productions of Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard and No Man's Land. It was there he created the role of Dr Rice in Brian Friel's drama, Molly Sweeney (1994), and again at London's Almeida Theatre. Other Friel productions he appeared in were The Communication Cord (Hampstead Theatre, 1984) and Aristocrats (2004) at the RNT in his final stage appearance. McKenna directed on occasion, and had to his name productions of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (Nottingham Playhouse, 1968), Thomas Kilroy's The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (Abbey Theatre, 1973) and Seán O'Casey's The