My Life on the Stage

As with most important events in my life, my involvement in theatre started in a pub. The Black Stuff is a venerable hostelry tucked just inside the city limits of Luxembourg. The large car park at its rear hinting at the loose drink driving laws in place in the Grand Duchy in the early 1990s.

I was several pints in and Brenda was being very persistent. “You’ll be perfect for the part”, she explained, ignoring the fact that I had never been on stage before. She went on to tickle my ego to the point where I could see Oscar nominations and a Hollywood career in the future. She sold it to me as the leading role in a 19^th Century Irish classic, a dashing young hero who sweeps the wife of a farmer off her feet and disappears, Heathcliff like, into the fading Wicklow mists.

In fact, I ended up playing a village idiot, a role I have reprised many times since. The plot involved an old farmer who had apparently passed away and was tucked under a sheet in the back corner of the stage. I was busy seducing his recently widowed wife, when at a key moment in the dialogue he would sit up and explain that he had only been sleeping.

It all went well until the last night, when he turned up excited as a spring lamb in the changing room before the show. He explained that his family had flown in from London for the show. I later learned that his marriage had fallen apart due to his alcoholism and the strong smell of Whiskey on his breath should have let me know that a wagon had just lost one of its passengers.

We got to the part in the play just before the big reveal, when I heard loud snoring coming from beneath the sheets. I was the only other person on stage at the time and realised that I would have to rescue the situation. I made my way over to the bed and kicked it gently. The snoring increased. I kicked harder but with no success. In the end I shook him violently, making up dialogue that would have shamed the original author.

He eventually woke up, spotted dialogue from a completely different play and fell back on pillow in a deep slumber. I blurted out the last line of the play and signaled to the stage manager to draw the curtains. We cut twenty minutes off the play length and probably left the audience short changed and confused. But in fairness, audiences in Luxembourg had pretty low expectations from the drama world in those days.

In the changing room afterwards, the director was keen to change the play’s ending to one where the old man actually ended up dead, but we held him back and ensured that no violence took place. I was left with the assumption that this happened in every amateur production. That you flew by the skin of your pants and it would be alright on the night. And that’s largely turned out to be true.

I went on to do two further plays in Luxembourg and then about fifteen in Dublin. The social scene in both countries was fantastic. In fairness the Luxembourg group was made up of Irish ex pats, who party harder than their companions back in Dublin.

I left Europe for the Southern Hemisphere in 2007 and hoped that the fun and laughter I’d found in theatre would continue. I performed in four plays in Australia, until parenthood stepped in and caused me to swap grease paint for nappy cream. I don’t remember those plays with any great fondness. Australians strive for perfection in everything. Sport is the obvious example, but no country will join a song competition named after another continent and expect to win it every year.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to do the best when I’m on stage. But I took up acting for the fun of being part of a group and not to become the next Brando. There always was talk of a ‘party’ at the end of each production, but this generally involved a warm bottle of beer while you took the set down.

New Zealand has been a better experience. They call it “Community Theatre” here and you do get a sense of a more collegial experience. But I’m also getting older and feel theatre requires a big commitment. I’ve just finished a show that had a large cast ranging in age from fourteen to eighty. In the week of the show, I was getting up at 7am, going to work, getting home and grabbing a quick tea before heading to the venue. Then getting home at 11pm and doing it all again. The fourteen year olds and the eighty year olds seemed to cope best. They weren’t working and looking after an eleven year old.

So, my conclusion is that community theatre is a young or old man’s game. Those of us in the middle, and particularly those of us who left becoming a Dad until our mid-forties, struggle to summon up the required energy.

I might take a break now from the stage, or ‘rest’ as we luvvies say. I need to fall in love with it again.   But of course, ego plays a strong role. If somebody contacts me and says that they are putting on a show and need me for a crucial role, I will probably say yes. There is nothing like being told that you are brilliant.

“Life is a gift, it would be a shame to send it back opened”, is a line from the recent show I did. That’s why I cling to all the activities I did in my younger life. I want to act, to play sport, to drink beer like I did in my twenties. But I’d also like to sleep. And life, love and age are dragging me inextricably in that direction.