Eamon Kelly

by Eamon Kelly

  Strangely enough, the Abbey management felt the Tailor needed a prop, and put on The Stranger by Strindberg as a curtain-raiser. But it was plain to all that the Tailor could stand on its own feet. At an early revival, prior to a national tour, The Stranger was dropped and the material cut from the Tailor script to make room for it was restored.

  Bríd and I played in places as far apart as Clonmel and Cahirciveen. In Clonmel we found ourselves part of the activities of coursing week. In us you couldn’t have found two less enthusiastic supporters of a sport where ferocious greyhounds are allowed to hack hares to pieces, and we gave the Abbey manager Phil O’Kelly a bandle of our tongues, as Ansty might say, for landing us in such a situation.

  We played in an old cinema under the title Destry Rides Again. The proprietors had forgotten to take down the sign of the last picture. In Cahirciveen there were no toilets backstage. We had to go down a rickety ladder to a turf shed, and our dressing-rooms consisted of an old caravan parked at the back of the Kingdom Cinema. When I sat downstage to talk to the audience, the audience talked to me.

  Arriving in Scarriff, county Clare, we found the hall locked and the caretaker couldn’t be found to let us bring in the set and props. After many enquiries it was revealed that he was cutting turf many miles away and had taken the key with him. Here, as in Cahirciveen, there was no house of lords backstage. Cast and crew were expected to use a hedged-in parcel of land at the rear. There were up-to-date facilities for the patrons at the bottom of the hall, but wild horses wouldn’t drag an actor through the audience after he is in costume and make-up. I procured a large empty paint tin which took care of the minor necessity.

  Leslie Scott, our lighting man, did a brilliant job in getting us properly lit, providing authentic looking ‘turf’ fires and ‘oil’ lamps as well as arranging that all house lights would go out as the curtain came across. In The Tailor and Ansty I had long solo passages where I told Tim Buckley’s many stories or discoursed upon ‘Lollipopus’, which was what he called Halley’s fiery comet speeding through the sky.

  On the first night in Scarriff there was one light which didn’t go out. It was a bare bulb under the balcony which lit up the entire bottom of the hall and was very distracting because of the arrival of latecomers. I was surprised that Leslie Scott, meticulous man that he was, hadn’t it under control. I soldiered on, my concentration wearing thin, until suddenly, nearing the end of Act One, the light went out.

  I rushed around to Leslie to ask what had happened. He told me he couldn’t find the switch for that light. ‘But,’ I said, ‘you put it out.’ ‘I know,’ he answered. ‘It took me some time to find the switch. It was in the caretaker’s house next door!’

  Interest in the show was so great that it was revived two years later but then, because of the untimely death of Bríd Ní Loinsigh, another actress filled the part of Ansty. Bravely, and with the knowledge of Bríd’s outstanding success in the role, Kathleen Barrington took over the part and was acclaimed by the critics for her interpretation. During this run in the Peacock, a play in the Abbey failed to bring the people in. The Tailor and Ansty came upstairs and filled the bigger house for two weeks.

  I forget how many times The Tailor was revived, but on the last occasion my wife Maura played Ansty. P. J. O’Connor always said that he had her in mind for the part when he wrote it. At that time Tomás MacAnna had brought a young man fresh from Trinity into the Abbey, and it was he who directed The Tailor this time. His name was Michael Colgan. He built the show out of the new, like the Tailor making a new suit. Maura’s Ansty was busy as a bee, all fuss and fooster, bringing new impetus to the part. The Tailor, because of a gammy leg, was anchored in various positions on the set. In Colgan’s direction he was orbited by Ansty, stinging him verbally into action with her acerbic tongue. She was an immediate success. With the bantering and mock-warring conflict between husband and wife, the piece played like a racy tune on an old fiddle.

  Again a play in the Abbey was a box office failure, and for a second time the Tailor and his spouse climbed the stairs to the mother house and filled it until a new show was ready.

  There was a call from the country again and Maura and I set out on a second Tailor tour, this time under the managership of my good friend Ronan Wilmot. We went to Derry and Benburb and south to Macroom, little more than a stone’s throw from Garrynapeaka where the Tailor once lived. Coming among people who knew him and Ansty inside out was a bit nerve-racking, but we must have been on the right lines because those who came thoroughly enjoyed the evening’s entertainment. They faulted me on one word. What Eric Cross wrote as ‘keening’ the Tailor would have pronounced ‘caoining’. I should have known better.

  In Macroom on the Saturday night there was only a scattering of people. Ronan Wilmot and John O’Toole, the stage manager, drove out to Gougane near the Tailor’s cottage on Sunday. In Cronin’s Hotel, after a meal, people who were all dressed up said they were going to Macroom to see their old friend, the Tailor. A good omen; interest was growing, and, sure enough, the house was packed that night and the next. Then we drove on to Bantry for more full houses. The old storyteller was being honoured in his own land.

  Maura and I made friends with the Tailor’s son, Jackie, and his wife, when we visited the Tailor’s one-time famous home. The day we were there, Jackie’s cow, what his father used to call the dairy herd, was about to calf. She was a friendly creature, as black as a crow, her barrel large, showing that she was near her time. I minded her out of the cabbages for a while, as I used to mind our own cow when I was a child in Carrigeen. I plucked a wide cabbage leaf and she ate it out of my hand. ‘You should have been a farmer,’ Jackie said, and he promised that if the cow had a bull calf he would call him after me. So it transpired, and when I met Jackie in Cork afterwards, he swore that the calf, which turned out to be a pet, used to answer to my name.

  ‘Éamon,’ Jackie said, ‘I sold you in Bantry fair last week for ten pounds.’

  SYNGE AND THE DANDY DOLLS

  In Hugh Hunt’s time as artistic director at the Abbey one of his first productions was The Well of the Saints, Synge’s famous play about two beggars. Beggars were very much part of the rural scene when I was young. They weren’t all travellers who lived under carts or in caravans, but maybe settled families who once had seen better days. Some people, not blessed with a great share of the world’s goods themselves, took them into their homes at night, and they slept on straw on the kitchen floor. Many of the lone men were fine storytellers and in the days before newspapers and radio they brought tales of the Fianna and news of the doings in the big world outside.

  Mick and Biddy were a well known pair who came by our house once a month. Mick stood outside and Biddy did the begging. She sometimes sat at the other side of the fire from my mother and drank a cup of tea. When she got something for her beg, she’d bring a cup of tea out to Mick and a slice of hot yella buck cake with butter melting at the top. They were as odd as two left shoes. Mick walked ahead of Biddy, looking back now and then, and calling, ‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’ She took no notice, but plodded away behind him humming to herself a tuneless air.

  Despite their oddness they were never the butt of youthful scorn like poor Nellie Mulcahy, a deranged beggarwoman I saw one time in my travels. Nellie loved bus conductors and spent her few precious pennies on short bus journeys so as to be in the company of the man in the uniform cap, and carrying the money bag and ticket puncher. When she was on foot her unkempt hair blew in the wind; she was a pathetic figure in a black shawl and raggedy skirt. The children taunted her as she made her mad way past them on the road to school.

  Synge’s two beggars are blind. They live in a world of their own, believing themselves to be beautiful people, a fantasy which is fuelled by cruel villagers. Martin Doul boasts of Mary’s beauty, of her bright blue eyes and golden hair, and Mary Doul in her imagination pictures Martin as a handsome prince. They are cured of their blindness by a saint at a holy well, and, in
the days before the looking-glass, each sees only the other’s ugliness. The stark reality brings bitterness and disappointment.

  Their fury knows no bounds. They curse, castigate and attack each other with a passion that burns like fire. In time the cure wears off, and when blindness returns we have followed them in their journey from darkness to light and back to darkness again. We have seen their great rage on discovering that their beauty was only a figment of their fancy.

  The angry storms having abated, they sit reconciled in the open air. They revert to their previous pursuit of selling peeled rushes to passers-by. (These rush piths were fried in lard, left to dry, and used as primitive candles.) Sounds are everything when sight is no more. The bleat of a sheep, the rippling of a rill or the swish of a bird’s wing catches their attention and is talked about. When stillness comes she reaches for his hand; they smile in contentment and are happy again in the world of the imagination.

  I was happy when Hugh Hunt cast me in the part of Martin Doul. Physically I was a little too large of frame to fit my description by Mary Doul when she upbraids me in her anger. But I had a feeling for Synge’s language. The lilt of it I had learned from my mother when she recited poetry or was carried away in her flights of picturesque prose. I loved the rise and fall of Synge’s speech and I gloried in its delivery. His words are not for measured speaking. They must flow, and at times come off the tongue in a torrent.

  Mary Doul was played by Máire Ní Dhomhnaill, no stranger to Synge’s language. John Kavanagh was the Saint and Patrick Laffan Timmy the Smith. Alan Barlow’s set, of large grey boulders against a treacherous sky, captured the dark, bleak mood of the play. Our opening night was 8 September 1969, and of it Desmond Rushe wrote in the Irish Independent: ‘There are moments which one always hopefully waits for in the theatre, but seldom experiences – those rare and terrifying moments which rivet one to one’s seat. Hugh Hunt achieves one of them in his brilliant production of J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints at the Abbey Theatre … Éamon Kelly plays Martin and Máire Ní Dhomhnaill plays Mary. They are both magnificent. The electrifying moment comes when Martin sees for the first time the woman he has dressed with soft skin, large blue eyes and long golden tresses. His reaction to the reality is a savage eruption of pain. His disillusionment is bitter and total, and he makes the audience share it with him to the full. His playing all through is incisive and superlative, but here he is stunning.’

  Seamus Kelly in the Irish Times said that Hugh Hunt’s direction gave classical treatment to a classical Abbey play.

  The Well of the Saints was considered short for a full night’s entertainment and it was the practice then to put on a curtain-raiser with it. This time it was The Dandy Dolls by George Fitzmaurice, being produced at the Abbey for the first time and also directed by Hugh Hunt. The experts call Fitzmaurice’s plays ‘folk fantasies’ and The Dandy Dolls is wild and weird. It is the story of Roger Carmody, who spends his days making grotesque dolls and his nights raiding the presbytery fowlhouse. The parish priest comes searching for his stolen goose ‘with the cuck on her’. Pat Layde, who played Fr James, asked me many a time what a ‘cuck’ was. I didn’t know, unless it was a tuft of feathers on the goose’s head.

  The human characters in the play are Roger, his wife Cauth and their child; Fr James, Keerby the priest’s clerk and Timmeen Faley. There are also what you would call otherworldly figures like the Grey Man, the Hag of Barna and the Hag’s son. The Hag’s son seems never to let Roger finish a doll because, as Cauth tells the Grey Man: ‘… Them dolls are the biggest torment to him in the world. For the Hag’s son is against them to the death, and so sure as Roger makes a doll, so sure will the Hag’s son, soon or late, come at it, give it a knuckle in the navel, split it in two fair halves, collar the windpipe, and off with him carrying the squeaky-squeak.’

  In the end he carries more than the squeaky-squeak, as we hear from Keerby the parish clerk talking to Fr James:

  Your goose is safe, your reverence, for it’s the wonderful thing entirely I now have seen … Roger being carried away by the Hag and the Son of the Hag. Riding on two Spanish asses they were, holding him between them by a whisker each, and his whiskers were the length of six feet you’d think, and his nose was the length of six feet you’d think, and his eyes were the size of turnips bulging outside his head. Galloping like the wind they were, through the pass of the Barna mountains, sweeping him along with them, for ever and ever to their woeful den in the heart of the Barna Hills.

  Fitzmaurice and Synge were the two sides of the same coin. Synge the outsider who went to the west and to Wicklow and learned the people’s language, and Fitzmaurice the insider who wrote in the tongue that was his from the cradle.

  Like Synge, Fitzmaurice was a Protestant. He was the son of a parson who married his housekeeper, lost his stipend and turned farmer. George’s mother, Winifred O’Connor, was of the old stock, and of course it was from her he heard the language of his plays. Her voice, I would say, echoes through the speeches of his mature women characters. No clucking hens these, but a bevy of songbirds singing it out, arms akimbo, like Maineen in The Magic Glasses. The sound of women’s voices filled his childhood: his mother talking to the servants, with whom she was all the one, the O’Connor relations coming and going, the women in the neighbouring houses where George, like the young Douglas Hyde in Roscommon, spent much of his time cabin-hunting. Women forever making tapes. As he grew older he moved among and listened to the men, at fair or market, working in his father’s fields or talking by the fire at night.

  Fitzmaurice’s language, like the speech of the people of Duagh in his time, is peppered with Irish words and phrases. ‘Boloeeriv’ when we first see it in The Pie-Dish has an eastern European look about it. Roll it on the tongue and it is nothing more mysterious than the familiar ‘Bail Ó Dhia oraibh’ we heard from Mícheál O’Hehir when the ball was thrown in at Croke Park.

  The word ‘shandanagh’ has a more homely appearance and turns out to be the old man in the corner, an sean-duine. ‘Cleakawn’ from claí, a small or low fence, is another of the many words which speckle Fitzmaurice’s dialogue. Words like ‘elaygil’, a laoigh ghil, a dear one, and ‘careshuck’, an chiarseach, the female blackbird. He captured and caged for us a people’s speech in lazy flight from Irish to English. What we hear is what was said, but the artist rearranges.

  The people who crowded his youthful days were still very vivid in Fitzmaurice’s mind when I knew him but briefly forty years ago. Over a glass of stout he would describe a scene at nightfall in Bedford near Listowel, where he was born: youngsters jeering a servant girl from west Kerry because they had heard she spoke Irish. She took refuge in a house into which they followed her and, cowering in the chimney corner, she told her tormentors that she understood Irish but didn’t speak it.

  But there was warmth, too, and tolerance. He recalled with some pleasure sitting with his father and the family in a front pew in St Mary’s Cathedral in Killarney when their neighbour, Dr Mangan from Bedford, was consecrated Bishop of Kerry.

  When I met George Fitzmaurice he was in his eighties and walked slowly, his body thrust forward. As he approached you in the street you found yourself looking into the top of his grey felt hat, the brim so broad that it almost hid his stooped figure. When you spoke to him, and you spoke quietly for he was very shy, he raised his head slowly. Gradually the light of recognition spreading from his eyes lit up his face. Then he smiled and there was a softly spoken greeting. He had a big, round, pleasant face and for his age a fine colour in his cheeks. His eyes were blue and, I think, very large; so was his mouth below a long upper lip. He had a curious habit of moving his mouth in a cud-chewing fashion as he listened. An old raincoat came almost to the ground.

  If you met him in O’Connell Street in the afternoon, he was on his way to Woolworth’s Café in Henry Street. The lunch rush over, he would take a tray to the self-service counter and retire to a quiet corner to have his meal. I took a cu
rious gent of a literary turn to the top of the stairs one time to see him but I wouldn’t for the world have allowed anyone to intrude on his privacy.

  You could meet him too at night-time, ambling up Grafton Street. He used to go to Mooney’s of Harry Street, an honest-to-God pub then, just across the road from McDaid’s. He stood by himself, a lonely figure, the support of the counter keeping him erect. It was here one night that I mentioned his plays and I think this put an end to our brief friendship. I had heard the stories … like the pub he hysed himself out of, never to come back, when a country barman asked him, ‘Are you the George Fitzmaurice whose plays do be on at the Abbey?’

  I wouldn’t have drawn down the subject, but that Mícheál Ó hAodha had asked me to try and persuade him to give Radio Éireann permission to broadcast The County Dressmaker and The Magic Glasses. He turned me down, but gave his permission subsequently.

  I think the last place I saw him was in the Winter Gardens, now gone, at the corner of Cuffe Street and the Green. As ever, he was by himself at the far end of the bar. I had gone in there during the interval, the night Brendan Behan’s An Giall opened at the Damer. He was curious about the sudden influx of thirsty gaeilgeóirí, noticing they weren’t regulars. I explained. He regretted he hadn’t learned some Irish. It was once a major European language, he told me, judging by the placenames, and spoken in Lisbon, Lisieux and Listowel! He pursed his lips and I thought I detected a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Fine acting in two revivals at the Abbey’ is how the Irish Times described The Dandy Dolls and The Well of the Saints when they were brought back in July 1970 for a short run prior to a London transfer for an international theatre festival. We played at the Old Vic and, the gods be praised, as happened on Broadway and on a former visit to the West End, I had a dressing-room to myself.