by Shane Briant
GOING PRO.
IRISH TELEVISION AND THEATRE.
Luck is everything in setting a career alight, isn't it? Of course – that's always been true. In my case luck came to me in the form of someone who had seen quite a few of my Trinity Players' productions. He suggested to a director at Raideo Teilefis Éireann that I might be suitable to play a young Hamlet opposite the legendary Irish actor Maureen Toal in a television series titled 'Shakespeare for Schools.' This was to be my first stab at acting for a camera – albeit a television camera.
A well-known Irish television director by the name of Louis Lenton who saw my television Hamlet when it aired then sent me a telegram asking if I would be available to play the young Andri in Max Frisch's 'Andorra.' Again it was for RTE.
I accepted at once. Milo O'Shea played my adoptive father – one of the very few people I have ever met who has bushier eyebrows than me.
But it was being cast by Nora Lever as Hamlet in the theatre production that was the biggest stepping-stone yet.
Nora used to mount productions of plays that were featured in the school curriculum of any particular year, and since her funds were limited, she needed young talent who would accept the basic minimum wage – actors who didn't much care for the financial aspect of the work, but were looking to be discovered. So in her professional production of Julius Caesar at the Eblana Theatre, I played Cassius – another glorious 'bad guy,' and in Hamlet I had a stab, for a change, at being a good guy.
My close friends from the Trinity Players came to see both shows and most were rather snooty. Shane? Playing Hamlet? Professionally? I don't think so. I was actually a tad hurt that they could be so less than supportive. Maybe they were jealous, as it was a major professional theatrical role and they had yet to turn pro. Anyway, who wouldn't kill to play Hamlet? Nevertheless, I was a little disappointed that the friends I had acted with in 'Under Milk Wood' could so easily pooh-pooh the production.
'Hamlet' at the Eblana Theatre Dublin. 1970.
However, I was relieved to find the Dublin theatre critics were more generous. 'Teenage Hamlet alive and original,' was my favourite quote, in the Irish Times.
Although it was hardly in the same league as the Royal Shakespeare Company, I felt our production had some merit and it certainly went down extremely well with the kids. That had been its purpose – not to impress the theatre cognoscenti. The Dublin Evening Press went even further. 'I have seen twenty-six interpretations of the role, and Briant's Hamlet may well have caught that little-boy-lost quality that has eluded at least one of our leading actors…this is the real Hamlet of our day and age.' I liked this man immediately and drew his sage words to the attention of all my pals at the Trinity Players, but few were impressed and all professed not to have seen the review.
There were three matinées a week of Hamlet. Each afternoon,
the theatre would fill with around four hundred children aged between eight and seventeen, all of them clutching bags of sweets and crisps bought at the concession shop in the foyer (some way had to be found of making enough money to mount the production, and Nora reckoned sweets and crisps were 'it'.) All had copies of the text balanced on their knees. And since they all had the school edition, the page turning every minute and a half sounded like a small plane flying through the theatre.
My favourite recollection of this production of Hamlet was when Claudius knelt very close to the edge of the stage and began his speech 'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.' The kids closest to the sage would invariably play a game to see who could bounce a boiled sweet off Pascal Perry's bald head.
My second favourite moment was one afternoon as I lay in Horatio's arms. As he said, "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" I distinctly heard a child sobbing somewhere in the stalls. Seconds later a tiny voice called out to me. "Oh jez! Don't die, Hamlet. Don't feckin' die!"
With the end of the run, a few more people in the Dublin theatre biz knew who I was. And quite a few young Irish actors had taken a dislike to the marauding Englishman who had arrived from London and snaffled the role of Hamlet. But there was another bonus in playing my first, and up till now my last Shakespearean lead. The manufacturers of a new heater called the 'Hamlet' enquired whether I would agree to having a life size cut out of me in my Hamlet black velvet costume mounted in the window of the gas showrooms in Stephen's Green. I asked for and received a hundred pounds, and for the following six months was ridiculed by all my Trinity friends.
After my 'Shakespeare for Schools' stint, I went back to the Players Theatre and several productions later was asked whether I would like to play the role of 'Cowboy' in a production of 'The Boys in the Band' in the vast two thousand seat Olympia theatre. I agreed at once, though I was concerned that my lack of 'hunkiness' – I was a snake-hipped lad weighing in at just under eleven stone – might be a drawback, as 'Cowboy' was a gorgeous 'American hustling hunk.'
Three weeks into rehearsals the producer took me to one side.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you, Shane."
I responded "Why?"
"Because you are not hunky enough."
I was shattered. "But I'm the same size now as I was three weeks ago."
He studied me. "Maybe. The thing is I never really looked at you then."
I was mortified. It was the first time in my pro life I had been fired before, and more importantly I was going to miss the eleven pounds weekly wage I'd been offered.
My producer could see my disappointment, so he came up with a novel idea. "Hey, Shane. Tell you what. You become our understudy and I raise your money to seventeen quid."
Although this helped assuage the embarrassment of having to tell my Trinity colleagues that I had been fired, I was still pretty glum. "Who do I understudy?" I asked.
"Everyone," was the swift reply – our producer was not a generous man at heart.
Luckily for me, no one fell sick, but on the final Saturday the cast played a nasty trick on me, telling me with only fifteen minutes to go I would have to fill in for Michael, the lead character, played by American, Doug Lambert. As the five was called I was still vomiting into the loo, clutching the text. The entire cast finally burst into the toilets and surprised me, shouting, "JOKE!"
Some joke.
In my last year at TCD, the Players Committee put me in charge of organizing Sunday evening entertainment. It was normally a very roughly cobbled together variety show giving everyone a chance to show what they could do; the emphasis being on amusement, music and humour. I remember one Saturday being asked by a fellow Trinity Player if he could possibly have 'a spot' because he wanted to showcase his talent for singing and playing the guitar. This was a problem that particular week as I already had a full list of attractions. But he wouldn't drop off, so I said, "Well, all right Chris. But make it just two songs. Okay?" As he left the theatre I called after him, "Oh… and please - not your own shit if you don't mind. Can you make them Beatles songs?" The young singer involved was Chris de Burgh. A fat lot I knew about talent and songs. Three years later he opened at the King's Road Theatre in Chelsea as the opener for 'Supertramp.' We're still good friends.
Variety night at Trinity Players. Anto OBrien plays trombone.
KEEPING MY FINGERS OFF YOUNG ACTRESSES.
I've always found that the shows you think will lead somewhere wonderful seldom do, and those that seem insignificant at the time prove to be the ones to propel you in the right direction. And so it was with my next professional production of Kevin Laffan's 'It's a Two-Foot-Six-Inches Above-the-Ground World.' I was back at the Eblana theatre, and although this frothy comedy about the pill was well received at the time, it was also to be a stepping-stone to London's West End and the beginning of my real career. The reason? It had nothing to do with the acclaim the play received –
which was okay, but no big deal – but rather because it just happened that the actress who play
ed my girlfriend in the play was the daughter of Irish theatre legend Vincent Dowling!
Bairbre Dowling. A temptation!
But before I explain this serendipity, let me make a case for myself being one of the world's great gentlemen. Well, almost. In the play Jacqueline, my girlfriend – played by the eighteen-year-old Bairbre Dowling – and I exit stage left during the first act and don't appear again for twenty minutes. For reasons I could never quite fathom, the set designer had failed to provide an exit to the wings the other side of the door we passed through. So when we left the stage we walked into a small box the size of a porta-loo. Bairbre then sat on my lap. We were then in darkness for the following twenty minutes.
At this point I have to point out that Bairbre was extremely
pretty, had a perfect body, flawless skin, long, thick, lustrous red hair and full lips. She also smelled absolutely intoxicating every night; a very alluring mixture of perfume and youth.
At the time I'd been going out with my then girlfriend Jane Dillon for two years so I knew I had to grin and bear it. I was also very aware Bairbre was the young and very innocent daughter of one of Dublin's most influential theatre directors. All in all it was like being offered a glass of Krug champagne every night, forced to inhale the heady bubbles, yet not taste a drop.
I never made a move during the entire run. But I couldn't help teasing myself just a teeny bit. Because let's face it I'm no saint!
When she sat in my lap and wound her bare arms around my neck to get comfortable, we could only talk to each other in the barest whispers. At the beginning of the second week, my fingers seemed to stray, of their own volition of course, down the inside of her arm towards her perfect silken left elbow. I noticed that her entire body tingled. So in a whispered aside, I explained that I had inadvertently chanced on what I referred to, erroneously, as an erogenous zone. She whispered back that, whatever it was called, it felt 'lovely.' So from then on I would run my fingers so very lightly up and down the inside of her arms each time we were in 'the box'. Why I put myself through this teasing torture I have no idea.
During the final week of the run Bairbre whispered into my ear. "Do you know of any more of those erogenous zones? You know, places where when you stroke them, it feels nice? If you do know, you can touch them now if you like?"
OMG… somehow I toughed out the following ten minutes.
As a footnote to this sexual torture I might add that this innocent, divine girl, who I thought knew nothing much about sex, chose to elope with an Italian film producer, almost twice her age, less than six months after we closed. She went to live with him in Rome and I am certain knew more about bedroom fun and games than he did!
I was not to see Bairbre for close on thirty-five years, when we met up again in a bar in New York. At that time she explained she'd definitely had a crush on me during that play. I managed not to attempt to stroke her 'zones.'
My first love, Jane Dillon, and my first cat, Trophy.
BREAKTHROUGH! 'CHILDREN OF THE WOLF.'
It was not long after this that I was asked by Vincent to audition for a play he was about to direct at the Dublin Theatre Festival, titled 'Children of the Wolf.' Just as well I restricted my fingers to Bairbre's arms!
Written by a young Englishman by the name of John Peacock, it was a play that the critics referred to as 'Grand Guignal.' I'd never heard of this genre before. As I researched I found Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was founded in 1894 in Paris by Oscar Metenier. With 293 seats, the venue was the smallest in Paris. The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak world view as well as
notably gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes. These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. John Peacock's play, which was a modern day Greek tragedy in style, fitted very nicely into this genre.
With Yvonne Mitchell in 'Children of the Wolf.'
Basically our play concerned the calling to judgment of a nymphomaniac mother who abandoned her twin children at birth. On their twenty-first birthday the twins lure her to a derelict mansion. Their 'interview' with their mother becomes an interrogation, and leads to a torture so cruel that one's sympathy shifts from persecutor to victim.
I was desperate to be cast as Robin as I knew that screen legend
Yvonne Mitchell, BAFTA winner with 'Woman in a Dressing Gown,' was to play the mother, and Sheelagh Cullen, a very up-and-coming young Irish actress was to play the twin sister role.
With Sheelagh Cullen in 'Children of the Wolf' at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury
Avenue.
The reason Vincent thought of me was because he had come to see Bairbre in the 'condom' play, unaware I was fingering his daughter's erogenous zones every night, and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
The long and short was that Vincent cast me, and the play was a huge hit at the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1971.
"Yvonne Mitchell is superb as the woman, and so is Shane Briant as the boy. Sheelagh Cullen is equally good," said the Irish Independent. The Evening Press said, "There is flawless acting throughout." The Irish Times said "Children of the Wolf is probably the strongest meat of
this, or any other festival."
The reaction from both the Dublin and the London critics was great. I couldn't have been happier. It was a fantastic role for me, incredibly emotional.
The result of so many London critics giving the play such accolades was that a representative of the Bernard Delfont organization approached Vincent with an offer to transfer to the West End. Our new home was to be the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.
"Vincent Dowling has established himself as a director par excellence," said the Dublin Evening Press, "And Shane Briant is a formidable new star."
Me? A star? This was the stuff of dreams.
So, only a matter of weeks later, Sheelagh and I climbed into my car and we motored from Dublin to London via the Holyhead Ferry and the M1 motorway.
Neither of us could disguise how thrilled we were – it was like being on speed for days on end, while drinking iced tea rather than consuming drugs. When we arrived in London, I drove directly to Piccadilly Circus and up Shaftesbury Avenue. Then I slowed my Mini Moke to a crawl as we passed the Apollo. All the photos and front of house 'stuff' was up reviews and all! It was the biggest thrill Sheelagh and I had ever had. So heady was it that we turned left and left again, so we could crawl past the theatre three times!
It had been a roller-coaster ride from Metellus Cimber to a three hander in Shaftesbury Avenue in just three years. And the most extraordinary coincidence was that my mother, Elizabeth Nolan, had played the Apollo for over two hundred performances in a play called 'The Housemaster' in 1934. Here I was, thirty-seven years later about to tread the same boards – amazing serendipity.
But I digress briefly – for one amusing event that occurred during the refresher rehearsals at the Apollo. Yvonne, Sheelagh, and I were into the last few extremely emotional moments of the play when a man appeared stage left and knocked hard against a post to gain our attention. We all stopped and stared. Vincent strode down to the stage from his seat in the stalls.
"I gather you maybe want to buy a door slam?" ventured the
suited intruder.
It was true, we did need one, it was a pivotal audio effect in the play; word must have gotten around the theatre scene. This man had a selection to offer.
"I got a big door, a small door, a toilet door, a double door…"
Vincent held up a hand. "Come and see me in an hour – you just sold a heavy front door."
The first night was the most thrilling moment of my life up till then.
The Apollo is not exactly an intimate theatre, seating almost eight hundred patrons, so it wasn't really the most suitable theatre for an intimate three-hander. But at short notice, it was the only one available in the West End. As far as I was co
ncerned the bigger the better, though I did have some reservations about being able to project to the back of the balcony – the Apollo has stalls, dress circle, upper circle and balcony.