by Eamon Kelly
On arriving at a community theatre or hall, Brian went to the scene dock and prop room and it was surprising what he came up with by way of stage setting. Two old bookcases of different sizes, one on top of the other, made a dresser. He’d maybe fish out a door and a window. With a few boards and sturdy scantlings he made a fireplace with a mantelshelf and gave the lot a coat of fast-drying paint.
There were nearly always black drapes to half-circle the result of his endeavours, and his intelligence and imagination gave me a credible, well lit scene in which to work at every centre.
In Lansing, Michigan, we were at the little theatre in the university and Brian got very believable furniture for the stage from the folk museum nearby. Here we were both called upon to talk to the drama class. Brian spoke about design and I about my work in the theatre.
From Lansing to Grand Rapids. It was a domestic flight in a plane with a seating capacity of little more than that of the Killarney to Rathmore bus. When the craft came down it seemed about to shake to pieces as it ground to a halt on the runway. In Grand Rapids we stayed with John Tully, a lawyer and possibly the tallest man in America. There was a great gathering of Irish people in his house after the show, some of whom hadn’t seen Ireland since they had left maybe twenty years before, and others who had never seen it. When we told them how things stood at home, the conversation turned to the Northern troubles. This was always so when we met Irish Americans. The younger men were very passionate about the North, and crew like fighting cocks.
In Austin, Texas, I was to play in the university theatre, which was in the round. This meant some changes in the presentation. In the house where we stayed, when the owner Kevin O’Connell and his wife went away for the day, we took a table and chairs out to the lawn and re-ran the show with an in-the-round audience in mind.
During this operation we forgot to close the door or to put the mosquito screen in place, with the result that when the lady of the house came back she found the place full of flies. ‘Who let the bugs in?’ she demanded. We were abject in our apologies while the insect repellent went into action.
Brian, with assistance from the crew, readied and lit the stage and the show worked like a dream. Anyway I had plenty of practice at playing in the round at the Peacock Theatre at home.
Dr Padraig Houlahan, who was with the American Space Programme, met us here, and he and Kevin O’Connell brought us to Maggie Mac’s for a drink. Maggie’s was a long narrow establishment with a sprinkling of Irish. A small country and western band played at the end. The lady vocalist came to the microphone and said, ‘Bobby Sands is very low tonight. He is in a coma now!’ There was a silence and she added, ‘I’ll sing an Irish song.’ What she sang was, ‘I have heard the mavis singing’.
Next day, Kevin O’Connell drove us to San Antonio, where I met Maureen Halligan. She took me to see Ronnie Ibbs. The theatre where they work, and where I played, is part of a convent university, a fairly big auditorium but we very nearly filled it. Afterwards we had a meal across the street with the nuns and Fr O’Gorman.
New Orleans by air was our next stop. It is a beautiful city and my favourite American place after New York. Strangely enough, the name of the university dean who welcomed us was Éamon Kelly. The evening paper said, ‘Stand Up the Real Éamon Kelly’. My name went on parchment as the Mayor, Ernest N. Maoil, conferred on me the title of International Honorary Citizen of New Orleans.
We were back in New York in time to board the boat for Bermuda. This was a cruise on the SS Doric, with a full complement of Irish Americans, arranged by Manhattan travel agents. Paddy Noonan with his orchestra and yours truly were on board to entertain them. The Doric was an Italian liner with an Italian crew. The chaplin was Italian also and on the first morning at Mass he wished us all to ‘half nice scruise’.
Working at sea was a new experience. I had played in many places, from large theatres on Broadway and in London to village halls in Ireland and Newfoundland. I did a show in the open air in county Cork with arc-lamps hanging from trees around a dancing deck. Cars on the rising ground circled the space with their headlights on the small stage. There was a rookery nearby and I competed with the disturbed occupants. An old lady sitting beside my wife, and unaware of Maura’s identity, said as she pointed at me, ‘Is that him now? Sainted hour, sure, my old man is as good looking as him!’
On board the Doric, the chapel in the morning was the theatre at night. Paddy Noonan and his musicians played there. I did two shows on the way out, two on the way back, and one when we were docked at Hamilton in Bermuda. I had lots of time off during the day to sit in the bar, read by the swimming pool or sunbathe on the upper deck. There were plenty of people to talk to, men who had left Ireland and who wished to talk about it. Sometimes late at night when Paddy Noonan played in the ship’s lounge I did a ten-to fifteen-minute stint at the microphone.
I noticed that some of the passengers were grossly overweight and at mealtimes these were the people who ate as if there were no tomorrows. Their eyes widened and they ‘ooh’ed and ‘aah’ed at the food before them. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and coffees in between, and late at night long tables on the mid-deck groaned under the weight of mouthwatering delicacies. Over the loudspeakers passengers were invited to bring their cameras. They did, and photographed the entire pâtisserie before anyone had time to sink a tooth in it.
We spent some days on the island of Bermuda with its beautiful beaches. I had forgotten my bathing suit and bought one in Hamilton, as well as a sports jacket, all for seventy-one dollars. The sea water had the quality of white wine. One day, lying on the golden sand after a dip, we heard on Brian’s radio that the Pope had been shot at in Rome.
A striking feature of the place was the white roofs of the houses. They seemed to be made of concrete. Each house had a huge tank to catch the rainfall as running water was scarce on the island. We fished out and found the house where Tom Moore lived when he was governor there.
We set sail again, north to New York. We docked at the West Pier, where thousands of Irish had first set foot in America. We bade a fond farewell to the many friends we had made on board, and, after a night’s rest, Brian and I had three more centres to do in the State of New York: Indwood, Scarsdale in Suffolk county, and one in a city hotel. When the owner of that hostelry saw my stage effects being trundled through the lobby, and when he beheld the dilapidated table, dresser and súgán chairs, he threw a fit and roared, ‘Take them away! I didn’t order such garbage!’
That show over, we were in the air again, going west to San Francisco, a city in its own way every bit as distinctive as New Orleans. We saw the famous tramcars, which are powered from a central electric rail in the street. Don’t ask me why people don’t get electrocuted by stepping on the rail, but it seems an insulated plunger reaches through a continuous slot to the power which is cunningly concealed below. The trams are very popular and when they are full, passengers crowd the entry platforms and hang from grips over running boards at the side. We rode on one down to the bay, took a boat around Alcatraz, the famous prison island, and under the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Irish have a fine centre in San Francisco. It is to this meeting place that our country’s emigrants flock in the early morning of the first and third Sundays of September to hear the RTÉ broadcast of the hurling and football All-Ireland finals.
It is a well equipped place with a large hall. So large, indeed, that Brian, not trusting the acoustics, asked me to use a microphone. This instrument ties me to one position. I prefer to move in the set, using the chair by the fire, at the table and the dresser. I introduce as much unobtrusive business as I can, and I have been known, in Dublin anyway, to fall to repairing a horse’s collar and winkers.
In San Francisco Brian enabled me to move about freely by getting me a radio device with a battery in my hip pocket and a tiny microphone on my lapel.
We played in Sacramento too, where it became so hot on stage that I nearly lost my b
reath. Here I met an ex-pupil from my teaching days in Listowel Technical School. He told me he was running a small ranch.
The tour over, we returned to New York where I got presents for Maura and Sinéad. At the airport Paddy Noonan paid us. The proceeds when divided up didn’t seem all that great; we admitted we’d have earned as much working in the theatre in Dublin. Travel and other expenses were high but we would not have missed the trip, and, as Brian said, not everyone in Ireland could claim to have slept where Hubert Humphrey and President Ford had laid their weary heads.
A STEPPE IN THE LEFT DIRECTION
Like the Skibbereen Eagle, the Abbey had had its eye on Russia for many a long day. Its actors had played in Edinburgh, London, New York and elsewhere, and it would be another feather in their caps to appear in the famed Arts Theatre of Moscow.
In Vincent Dowling’s term as artistic director an invitation came to play in Leningrad (as it was then) and Moscow. The plays the Russians asked for were The Great Hunger, a drama by Tom MacIntyre based on Patrick Kavanagh’s poem of that name, and The Field by John B. Keane.
John B. is the people’s playwright. For many years, from Valentia to Belturbet, the rafters of parochial halls have rung to the raciness of his poetic outpourings. From the early 1980s he enjoyed an amazing popularity at the Abbey Theatre. I was in Sharon’s Grave, which was presented there by the Irish Theatre Company when Christopher FitzSimon was its artistic director. The play was directed by Sheila Richards, who found some of the Kerry dialogue a little strange. I had to plead with her to keep in expressions like ‘above in the room’ and ‘below in the kitchen’, because, as she said, the set in which we played had no upstairs.
In 1984 I appeared as Morrisheen Brick in The Man from Clare. John B. brings the footballers of Cuas in county Clare across the Shannon to play the Bealabawn team in Kerry. The play was directed by Patrick Laffan and had Ray McAnally in the cast.
Then in 1985 came Sive. It was first produced by Listowel Drama Group in 1959 and had a long journey to the Abbey through the halls and ballrooms of rural Ireland. It was directed at the National Theatre by Ben Barnes, with Marie Kean, Catherine Byrne, John Olohan, Meave Germaine and Donal Farmer among those in the cast.
Sive has a chorus of two travelling men, Pats Bocock and his son Carthalawn. I was Pats and Macdara Ó Fáharta played my son. While on stage, they both comment on the night’s proceedings in song and in story. Carthalawn plays the bodhrán and Pats beats time on the floor with his blackthorn stick. In Act Two, which is the eve of a wedding, there is porter in the house and father and son lower two bottles without taking the containers off their heads.
On opening night, to my exhortation of ‘Your best! Your almighty best!’ Carthalawn hit the bodhrán with such vigour that he drove his knuckles through the skin, but with amazing alacrity and without missing a note he continued to beat out the rhythm on the rim of the drum. There were many revivals of Sive – a play with which to make music on a box-office till. My last appearance in it was with an Abbey cast at the Gaiety in 1994.
John B. came to see us once while the play was in rehearsal, but he and director Ben Barnes met and talked over the production beforehand. They became firm friends and 1987 saw Ben directing The Field, which had first been produced in Dublin by Phyllis Ryan’s Gemini Productions in November 1965 with Ray McAnally as the Bull McCabe. There had also been an earlier presentation at the Abbey with Joe Lynch in the part of the Bull. In Ben Barnes’s production the Bull was played by Niall Tóibín, and a vicious bloody Bull he was too. My heart raced with fear as he and his son Tadhg (Brendan Conroy) killed the man who would take their precious field from them.
Big Maggie, with Brenda Fricker in the title role, completed the Keane trilogy directed by Ben Barnes at the Abbey, but it was The Field that was to be seen again in a far off land.
Maura and I were to play Mr and Mrs Dandy McCabe. On Saturday 6 February 1988 we packed our bags for Russia. ‘Air your woollies for Arbour Hill!’ was the call to active young republicans approaching winter in Kerry in the 1940s, and we made sure that only warm clothing was in our luggage. I bought a heavy long black topcoat in the Blarney Woollen Mills in Nassau Street. I had a Russian hat, synthetic fur of course, and with a warm scarf and gloves I was ready to face the severest Russian winter.
On Sunday at 2.30 p.m. we boarded a coach for Limerick and Shannon from the front of the Abbey. The two pubs opposite, the Plough and the Flowing Tide, put up a free drink for thirsty travellers. Danny O’Sullivan, the barman in the Tide, regretted he wasn’t going with us. He made me down a vodka to get me in training in case of a Moscow pub crawl.
We stayed overnight in the Two Mile Inn at Limerick and after breakfast we crowded into the coach for Shannon. Our tour manager distributed visas and customs forms, and there was much writing to be done as we drove along. ‘Any firearms? Any antiques?’ Myself maybe.
The check-in at the airport was a bit hectic. There were the casts of two plays, the crew, the lighting and design people, the touring manager John Costigan and the theatre manager Martin Fahy as well as representatives of the press. A premature announcement to board at Gate 4 sent us all scurrying towards departures, but it turned out that we had plenty of time. Time to go to duty free, pose for photographs and have interviews with press and radio.
‘And how do you feel now, Éamon, going to play in the Moscow Arts Theatre?’
‘I feel,’ I said, ‘like an old Kerry parish priest going to say Mass in the Vatican.’
A while in the air and drinks were passed around. I opted for a vodka – neat. It was heart and belly warming. Reds throw it back in one gulp. I sipped it and waited for our first taste of Russian food, only to find that the lunch packs were made up at Shannon. There were the old familiars, Kerry Gold butter, Siúcra Éireann and Galtee cheese.
I sat by the window at the Kildare side as we flew eastwards. It was a beautiful day. The cold land and seas of northern Europe unfolded before me. Gradually the light faded. The days were short and darkness was not far away. Then we were above the clouds and the slanting sun still shone on a floor of cotton wool. As we neared Leningrad we lost height and I could make out roads stretching along the snow covered countryside.
The dark portions I took to be forests. As we descended, the roads seemed to be deserted and we must have gone the breadth of Munster before I saw my first car, the headlights making the snow in front a little whiter. As we neared the city the traffic increased to two or three cars, never more, moving between the clusters of lights that indicated the villages.
We made a perfect descent, like gliding down on a feather tick, and a perfect landing. We were bused from the runway to an austere arrival hall. The passport check was very strict. The official, who seemed to be in army uniform, not only looked at me but peered closer through half-closed eyes and back to the photograph. He motioned me to turn round and take off my hat. Grudgingly, I thought, he let me pass on.
There was a long delay for our luggage to come through. One hour and twenty minutes. John Costigan had warned us about it, having been here before. We had to go through customs again even though our baggage had been checked at Shannon by Soviet personnel. Then there was a big rigmarole about currency and more writing to do.
At last we were in the coach and heading for the city centre. It was not as bright as O’Connell Street. We drew up at the Hotel Europe, a stocky building of three or four storeys with a frowning cornice. Inside, the large lobby with its pillars, plaster decor and gold painted figures reminded me of old-time hotels I had seen in New York.
The riddle of the rooms was sorted out. Sharing was the order of the day. Some resented this, but I was not complaining. My wife and I were in 236, a real relic of oul’ decency: not a room, a suite, with a charming sitting-room, beautifully furnished and with a television set, a radio (not working) and a phone. A bedroom opened off, and a bathroom with glazed tiles and brass fittings that must have been put in place before I was born. The door key
was huge and the lock so ancient that it took some time to get the knack of opening it.
Dinner was to be at 9.30 p.m. I had a drink first in the currency bar. There were also currency shops where goods could be obtained for sterling or dollars. I had a nip of brandy and needed it at two degrees below. It cost me £1.75. As I paid the barman I said I could have got it for less in the Flowing Tide. ‘Spaseeba,’ he said and filled a beer for a thirsty tourist. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times dropped in and was suitably chuffed by my remark that the Abbey’s visit to Russia was a ‘steppe in the left direction’.
The dinner brought me back to a Listowel eating house during race week in the 1940s. All manner of servants helped at table, from fully fledged waiters to women in high boots dressed for the snow. The food was fine and a bottle of Georgian red wine cost four roubles – you’d have change out of a fiver. And so to bed. I bid the porter good-night in Russian. He glanced at his watch and told me the time. Oh well, it was only the first day.
Next morning we were taken on a guided tour of the centre of Leningrad. We visited St Isaac’s cathedral, its interior sumptuously decorated with ceiling paintings, mosaics and icons. It was heavily pillared and had massive candelabra converted to electricity; before that the candle grease droppings, we were told, were carted away in wheelbarrows! As well as tourists there were many, many Russians eagerly drinking in every word that poured from the lips of the guide speaking their language, but it was strange to think that this once sacred place was now somewhere to be gawked at and not prayed in any more. Pews, if they were ever there, had been removed to make room for the shuffling thousands who passed through the building every day.