by Eamon Kelly
The storyteller, sitting at the side, opened the tale and, as his characters materialised, the actors, as it were, leaped from his imagination and the story became alive. When it was not feasible, visually, to move the story ahead, the storyteller took over momentarily, in much the same way as a narrator in a radio play.
My contributions were mostly in the first half, interspersed with dance and song. We had a giant and a horse, not the pantomime type but the traditional wren boys’ animal which roams the streets of Dingle on St Stephen’s Day.
It was a happy show and went down well. It was described as ‘exquisite’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘delicious’ by the critics. Desmond Rush wrote in the Independent: ‘The folklore and folkmusic blend superlatively well, which elevates Scéal Scéalaí above any other entertainment of its kind I have seen in the Abbey or the Peacock.’ Because Tomás MacAnna was unable to accompany us, I as co-author of Scéal Scéalaí was made director of our two Gaeltacht tours. We played first in the Taibhdhearc in Galway. I remember when the run was over and the actors were sitting in the lounge of the Ardilaun House Hotel, where we were staying, when news of Bloody Sunday in Derry came on television.
The sight of Fr Edward Daly with his white handkerchief, pleading for a safe passage for the wounded, filled our hearts at once with shock and admiration. When the full tally of those killed by the military became known, anti-British feeling ran high in Galway and throughout the country.
Our next show was in Carraroe in west Galway the following night. We arrived there in the morning and were busy setting up the stage when a group of people arrived and I was told in meticulous Irish that because of the bloodshed in Derry, if the show went ahead that night history would be made in Carraroe. Despite the sweetness of the speech there was no doubting the threat their words carried.
I rang Dublin. The Abbey wanted me to go ahead with the show. They were at a safe distance. I was on the spot and didn’t fancy trouble. I discussed the matter with Tadhg Crowley the tour manager and the actors, and we decided to postpone the show for one night as a mark of sympathy with the relatives of the dead in Derry. That night at the time of the show there was Mass in the local church, and the priest invited the actors to intone prayers, from a script which he had given them, for the repose of the souls of the dead, for the comfort of the living and for the forgiveness of those who perpetrated such a heinous crime. He wanted me to pray that God would put Paisley ar bhóthar a leasa (on the road of rectitude). I didn’t feel like doing so, and made an excuse to get out of it.
Next morning Peadar Lamb and I, with a broadcasting unit hired in Galway, went around the district publicising the fact that the postponed show would be held that night. We turned up the volume to reach houses far in from the public road. People crowded to the doors to listen, and animals in the fields stopped their grazing and wandered in our direction, attracted by the augmented sound of music and speech, something they didn’t hear every day.
The show was a success that night in Carraroe and the night after in Spiddal. Our next stop was in Inis Mór in the Aran Islands. The settings, lights, costumes, props and crew went in by boat. Tadhg Crowley, the touring manager, and the actors travelled by Aer Aran. I remember actor Clive Geraghty gave his plane seat to Finnola Eustace who was our stage manager. There was a bumpy landing on the grass runway on the island.
When we got settled up in our lodgings – I slept in the presbytery in a bed reserved for the bishop when he visited his island parish – we got down to setting the scene in the local hall. The ESB didn’t go to Aran then and our electric power was from an oil-driven generator. The stress must have been too much for the engine because the power failed half an hour before the show. I had visions of scouring the island for candles and oil lamps which would have been a poor substitute for the lighting effects devised by Tomás MacAnna and Mick Doyle.
Mick worked like the trooper he was on the generator, and by reducing the load to suit the machine’s capacity, with only a little time to spare before the afternoon show the lights came on to a mighty cheer.
Schoolchildren made up most of our first audience, and it was heart-warming to see their young faces in the front rows all aglow at the splash of colour, at the music, the dance and the sight of the giant and the pantomime horse. For these children it was their first experience of a travelling show and their reaction was different from their mainland cousins. When the final curtain came down there was no applause. We bowed a second time but there was no putting together of hands. But the children weren’t disappointed. From their laughing faces and their animated conversation there was no mistaking their happiness.
Applause wasn’t stinted at the night’s performance, and when it ended the audience remained in the hall. In a while’s time musicians appeared, the seats were pushed back and the local people took to the floor in a set dance. I have never heard dance music played so fast, or with such vigour, and the sound of heel and toe on the boarded floor nearly lifted the roof. We actors joined in the merriment, as our hosts tapped out a welcome to us. Their merry feet seemed to beat out an appreciation of what they had seen on stage.
Next day Fergus Bourke took the cast in costume out on the rocks to take some pictures. The ladies were posing in a group when two young men of Aran came by on tractors one behind the other. They were attracted by the loveliness of the scene, and looked in that direction. To savour the view all the more the man in front stopped his vehicle suddenly, and the man behind, not noticing, ran into him. They were going slowly and not much damage was caused by a shapely leg turning a head.
In Tourmakeady we played in the convent. It was a boarding school, and in the afternoon we gave a performance for the girl students. There was a meal for us in the convent refectory afterwards. That night the local people piled in, and the nuns who hadn’t seen the afternoon show came. Backstage opened on to a wide landing with a stairway leading to the college dormitory. The young ladies, taking advantage of the nuns’ being at the show, climbed out of bed, and in their dressing gowns sat on the steps like angels draped on a celestial stairway. Bryan Murray, Clive Geraghty and the young actors were the object of their interest.
We stayed in Belmullet when we played in Aughleam, the west Mayo Gaeltacht by Blacksod Bay. When I looked out the window in Belmullet the first morning the streets were crowded; lots of cars parked and moving about. At breakfast I enquired if there was a fair or market being held, and I was told that it was dole day. Out walking later, I saw country people buying vegetables in the shops. I thought this odd while acres of their land lay fallow.
Even though Aughleam was a Gaeltacht, we got the impression from various things that were said in Belmullet that there might not be too great a welcome from the powers-that-be for a show in Irish. We wondered what kind of reception we were going to get.
We arrived in Aghleam next morning to find that the posters advertising the show lay unopened in the presbytery. Better late than never, so we distributed them then and got a broadcasting unit to publicise the evening’s entertainment throughout the district and into Belmullet. We didn’t meet the parish priest; the curate opened the hall for us. He was a pale-faced, puffy-cheeked man with an inordinate amount of white in his eye. His black hat sat squarely on his head and his countenance ne’er broke into a smile when he greeted us.
There was no seating in the hall, a fact that hadn’t been made known to our touring manager when the place was rented. The curate’s solution was that those who came could stand. Tadhg Crowley and myself said that on no account would we expect an audience to stay on their feet for two hours. He told us that others who had rented the hall had played to a standing audience, and if it was good enough for them it was good enough for us.
That remark got our dander up, and without putting a tooth in it, we told him that it wasn’t good enough for us. Tadhg went into the convent in Belmullet and got two lorry-loads of chairs from the school. God bless the nuns! Now, by placing the loose stools from around the walls of
the hall at the front, we had enough seating for the big crowd that came. That night, performance-wise, the show turned out to be one of the best of the tour.
Afterwards the chairs had to be loaded on the transport to take them back to the convent in Belmullet. This, together with striking the set and putting our props and costumes and furniture on the bus, took time, and the curate was furious at the delay. He wanted to lock the hall. ‘Mr Keane’ he called me as he pulled out the plug of the electric fire where Mícheál Ó Briain was drying his cap in the dressing-room. He ordered us out from backstage.
Tadhg Crowley always made a point of paying the owner of the hall when the show was over. In this case, because of the unfriendliness of the curate, he decided to let him wait. ‘There’ll be a cheque in the post for you,’ he said to him.
Outside the darkened hall there were flashes of lightning, and the roll of approaching thunder. As we piled into the bus all heaven broke loose overhead. I was last on the entry line, and was about to place my hand on the door handle when a flash of lightning ricocheted off it, and little stars danced on the chromium plating. Soon the rain and the hailstones pelted down on the roof of the bus, and almost drowned out the music and song as we sped towards Belmullet.
Next morning our journey was north to Gweedore, where it was a pleasure to play in a fully equipped little theatre.
Our second Gaeltacht tour a year later brought us south of the line from Dublin to Galway. The entire cast and crew travelled by bus, the back portion of which had been converted to take the scenery, lighting, costume and props. On our way to a one-night stand in Reenroe Hotel in Ballinskelligs we stopped by the graveyard in Spunkane, near Waterville, where the well known actress Bríd Ní Loinsigh is buried. Those of us who had worked with her, Peadar Lamb, Mícheál Ó Briain, Joan O’Hara, Máire Ní Ghráinne and myself, went in and dropped a prayer pebble on her grave. The younger people remained on the bus. They said they had never heard of her. Impermanent, indeed, is the actor’s craft.
We all stayed in Reenroe Hotel. We dressed where we slept, and walked downstairs ready to go on stage, which was in the hotel dining-room. Not an ideal place. We found that the carpets and window drapes deadened the sound a little. In the bar later a local man said to me that song, dance, music and story were all very fine, but he would have preferred a straight drama. Why didn’t we bring Mícheál Mac Liammóir’s Diarmuid agus Gráinne? I told him that the Abbey had toured the Gaeltacht areas a few years earlier with an Irish version of The Colleen Bawn, and that Scéal Scealaí was another aspect of the theatre people might like to see.
‘Have another pint,’ he said, ‘and bring a play the next time.’
We visited Cork, Listowel, Ventry and Coolea, where I met many Irish-speaking friends. This Gaeltacht is just over the hill from where I was born. I was in my element here, being the only Munster person in the cast. Kay Kent of the Irish Times visited us and stayed with the company till we reached our next stop, which was Ballingeary.
‘Going round with the Abbey Company from hall to hall,’ she wrote, ‘one realises that this village to village touring is every bit as important a part of the National Theatre’s work as is playing to its regular audiences in Dublin.’
The Ballingeary hall where we played housed Coláiste na Mumhan (Munster College) where people went to learn Irish in the early days of the Gaelic League. Indeed I had been there thirty years ago on the same errand. A woman in a shop in the village told Kay Kent that I had stayed in her house then. The poster in the window advertising our show had my name underlined in red.
I remembered that summer of long ago and the evenings spent céilí dancing in the hall. Like nearly all the young men who go to an Irish summer course, I fell in love, and we climbed the mountain above Gougane Barra lake together. We strayed the river banks along and talked love in Irish that didn’t as yet have the fluency to match the passion of the hour.
While in Ballingeary with the show, the cast stayed in Gougane Barra Hotel hard by the Tailor’s cottage and next door to Dinny Cronin’s house. Both houses belonged to the Cronin brothers and sat at the edge of the lake shore. In the daytime, rambles by the lake, browsing on the pilgrimage island and strolling in the new forest full of wild life were treats for all of us, but more so for those brought up in the city. Tommy Rogers, a crewman who had never been out of Dublin except for a visit to the Isle of Man, had thought such wonderful scenery didn’t exist in Ireland.
Mrs Cronin the hotel proprietress endeared herself to all with her friendliness and wonderful cooking. The beating of her omelette I haven’t tasted at home or abroad. She was a gentle lady and grew in our visitors’ estimation when I told them that her brother was a cardinal in America. There was a party for us on the last night. Neighbours came in and one young lady sang the beautiful Munster song, ‘An Binsín Luachra’ (‘The Bench of Rushes’). Young local performers gave a comhrá beirte (a comic conversation in Irish) which had won them a prize at the Irish language festival in Dublin. We had music, step-dancing and stories.
We heard of the monster (ollaphiast) which grew so big in the lake in olden times that fish were no longer left to appease its appetite, so it began to eat the monks. The abbot put a curse on it and the giant reptile-like creature, activated by a fierce fire raging in its bowels, worked its way out of the lake and eastwards through Inchageela to Cork harbour. The top lakewater followed in its wake and so the river Lee was formed. A tall tale as old as Methuselah. But the night’s entertainment had all the basic ingredients of the show we were doing on the stage every evening.
THE EAGLE FLIES OUT ON THE WREN’S BACK
Later in 1976, and to make a further Irish contribution to the celebrations of the American bicentennial year, the Abbey Theatre was invited to bring a play to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The tour was also to take in a number of cities in New England. American Actors’ Equity stipulates that a visiting company must bring two shows. This would have been a heavy burden on the theatre’s resources, so the management of the Abbey hit on the idea of making my storytelling evening the second leg of the tour.
When I was in New York for the Eoin McKiernan Irish Fortnight in March, I put on In My Father’s Time at the Irish Centre for Harvey Lichtenstein, head of the Brooklyn Academy, to see. He approved, and at the end of November for the third time that year I crossed the Atlantic. Michael Colgan, who directed the show and managed my Irish tour, was with me on the flight, as was the Abbey Company with Cyril Cusack, Siobhan McKenna, Angela Newman and John Kavanagh, to name but a few, who were playing in The Plough and the Stars.
The availability of my show and its inexpensive outlay made the tour possible. It was a reversal of the old folktale, I joked with Michael – the eagle was flying out on the wren’s back. My set, stage furniture, props and costume had gone on to New York by surface some time before.
The Plough and the Stars was put on in the large auditorium of the Brooklyn Academy and my show in the smaller Lepercq space upstairs. The auditorium of the Lepercq sloped up from the stage edge, and a member of the audience, if he so wished, could walk on to the acting area.
At the interval on the first night this is exactly what Irish people did. They came and sat on the chairs, on the settle, and ‘warmed’ themselves to the very realistic Leslie Scott fire in my cottage kitchen. They examined and touched everything – artefacts which reminded them of home. Michael Colgan, who came back to the stage to supervise the setting for part two, found them walking away with sods from the turf basket. One woman was putting a caorán (fragment of a sod) into her handbag. Michael remonstrated with her. She said that another lady had gone off with a full sod, and why was he making an exception of her? For the rest of the run a crewman had to stand guard, or items irreplaceable in New York would have gone to decorate the sideboards of Irish American homes in Yonkers and Queens. But it was heart-warming that the Irish had turned up in such numbers and I was kept busy afterwards autographing my programme. This was a stylis
h affair with notes by the folklorist Dr Seán Ó Súilleabháin and writer Con Houlihan.
Michael Colgan and I knew of the tradition whereby anyone with a show opening in New York stayed in that literary and theatrical sanctum, the Hotel Algonquin. I remember visiting it when Brian Friel stayed there during the run of Philadelphia, Here I Come! The hotel was a cut above the common and a necktie and jacket were de rigueur in the lobby, the restaurant and the bar. But the porter was known, for a consideration, to fetch a tie and jacket from his cubicle if one came unprepared. Michael and I booked in there before opening night. We were welcome from the outset. I knew the desk clerk, who used to work in the Excelsior Hotel in 82nd Street when I was in New York in 1966. He saw to it that we were seen after.
I was the first to get a cab. I was called from the end of the line and walked past potentates from Texas with ten-gallon hats to the summons of ‘Mr Kelly, your cab!’ The doorman who hailed me was my first cousin Pat Curtin. He was the son of Tim Curtin from Muingnamunane, near Castleisland, who was married to my Aunt Margaret in Queens.
The Algonquin at that time boasted one of the biggest tomcats I had ever seen. This marmalade monster sat on his bottom in the middle of the lobby and mewed to clients whom he perceived to be cat lovers. I patted him on the head and got a love-bite that nearly took a finger away. The lobby had a newspaper and magazine stand. The owner, a friendly New Yorker, remembered the Irish who had stayed in the hotel. He talked of Jack McGowran and he told me what Brendan Behan said to the lady in the fur coat – a remark positively refreshing if unprintable.
This good man (Pat Curtin must have had him primed) laid aside for me the papers that carried reviews of the show after opening night. I did well, but one reviewer claimed that for a while, until he got used to it, my Kerry brogue had him guessing. The same complaint had been made about the Dublin accent in The Plough and the Stars, although Seán Cronin, writing from New York in the Irish Times, said the night he was at In My Father’s Time, the reaction of the audience to my stories suggested that there was no language barrier.