Philadelphia, Here I Come! ran for three months at the Lyric Theatre in the West End. I had been in it off and on from 1964, and continually for almost two years since it had opened on Broadway at the beginning of 1966. It was time for a change. Back in Dublin after a meeting with Tomás MacAnna, artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, I was cast in Spreading the News, which was part of a Lady Gregory season at the Peacock. Tomás himself was to direct it.
The Abbey then was a secure place for actors. They were all permanent, some of them working together for as long as twenty years. It was very much like a large family and I felt an intruder for a long time. I likened the house to a caring old bird with her brood sitting comfortably under her protective feathers. But this old bird, though moulting at times, was true to the ideals of the theatre’s founders, and mostly sang the native song. It was the song heard in the cities and villages of Ireland. When she sang it well, it was true and glorious and sent a tingle dancing in the blood. She faltered only when she sang to a borrowed tune.
When I joined the Abbey in 1967 many young people were coming in from the school of acting. There was a tendency then to cast juveniles in oldish parts, which meant a heavy application of make-up. I often thought that the young men’s heads tended to bend forward under the weight of greasepaint, revealing necks of a natural complexion.
Each actor had an empty cigar box with a hinged lid in which he kept his sticks of Miner’s or Leichner’s make-up. The sticks were numbered and the most commonly used were No 5, a yellowish shade put on all over the features as a base, and No 9, a red stick applied over the base where the natural colours were prominent in the face. It was much used for florid, outdoor types, of which there were many in the plays of the time. No 15, a paler red, was mixed with No 9 to tone it down for characters with sedentary occupations. A dark stick, No 7, was used if an actor was in the part of an African or Asian, for example the Indian peddler in Bryan MacMahon’s The Bugle in the Blood.
By rubbing a pared matchstick to No 7, lines could be drawn to indicate wrinkles on the forehead or at the corners of the eyes. Some actors highlighted these dark lines with a streak of white. But the veterans thought this was overdoing it. Cyril Cusack once said that he spent half his life putting in wrinkles and the other half obliterating the natural ones. There was lake, a dark red stick, which was applied above the eyes to set them back, because the old form of stage lighting tended to flatten the face. Lake was also used around the mouth.
Some placed an eye-liner under the eye and put a dot of carmine in the eye-duct with a hint of white underneath. An old actor told me this was to give a little eagerness to the face. The entire make-up job was dusted down with a face powder, and Fuller’s earth was used to grey the hair.
A complete set of make-up was costly, and actors entered it in their expenses sheet when making out their income tax returns. One young man fresh from the day job had no make-up. He borrowed it from his fellow players. One asked him when he was going to buy some of his own and he replied, ‘I’m waiting to see if I’m going to be kept.’
Cadging make-up was not unknown and there was a tight-fisted thespian who went for ages without buying any. He had an empty cigar box with a hinged lid from which he had cleverly removed the bottom. When it came to the time to prepare for the show, he placed the bottomless container on top of another actor’s open box. As they chatted he lifted his lid and helped himself to the other’s make-up. When he finished he slapped down the lid and said to his friend, ‘Have a good one!’
Tomás MacAnna’s production of Spreading the News and Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself, translated by Lady Gregory, was an outstanding success. Music and song were added to both pieces in the manner of Máirín O’Farrell’s treatment of The Playboy of the Western World in The Heart’s a Wonder. ‘Opera buffa’ one dissenting voice called the concoction.
When King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of the Belgians visited Ireland later on, Spreading the News was revived and presented with J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea and An Pósadh by Douglas Hyde in a special gala performance for the royal couple. The No 1 Army Band played the Belgian and Irish anthems. During the interval the bar was cleared and the actors in the three plays were invited upstairs to be presented to the King and Queen.
We were arranged in a huge semicircle and Mícheál Ó hAodha, chairman of the Abbey board, brought the royal couple around, introducing each actor to them. When the royal visitors were in front of me, Mícheál was called away and the King and Queen were left looking at me. I guessed that royal etiquette precluded me from speaking to them. They smiled, and it must have been some impishness in my face that made them laugh. We were politely controlling our merriment when Mícheál returned and introduced us. They passed on, the Queen pausing to talk with Bríd Ní Loinsigh, whose performance as Maurya in Riders to the Sea was superb.
Next in line to meet us was President Éamon de Valera. He was being neglected tonight because of the presence of royalty. The President’s eyesight was failing then. He walked rubbing shoulders with his aide-de-camp and shook hands with the cast. When he was near me he turned to his aide and said in a low voice, ‘Who are these?’ The aide told him that we were the actors. With a beam on his face he shook my hand with renewed vigour. I spoke to him in Irish, which seemed to please him because his smile broadened considerably.
The event was widely covered in the papers next day and Seamus Kelly, writing in the Irish Times, ended his article by saying that, according to the talk in the foyer after the show, the night was stolen by Bríd Ní Loinsigh’s Maurya, by Peadar Lamb’s Raftery, and humility almost precludes me from admitting that I was mentioned too.
My first play on the stage of the new Abbey was The Saint and Mary Kate, adapted by Mary Manning from Frank O’Connor’s novel of the same name. I played the part of a daft carpenter called Grog Mahon. I remember Patrick Murray’s scenery had a towering contraption supporting a platform on which I did my work. Every night I had to climb up to it in a blackout. It was an unnerving experience. I dreaded missing my footing in the dark. The trick, I found, was to make a mental picture of the object and its direction from the wings while the light was on it. Then let your guardian angel take you by the hand when darkness fell.
The play was set in a Cork city tenement called the Doll’s House. Frank Grimes and Bernadette McKenna played the young lovers. For this production, director Frank Dermody brought the new Abbey stage mechanism into effect. You had lifts coming up and going down with the actors at the end of a scene, in the manner of Tommy Dando at the organ in the Savoy Cinema. On a night on which the punters were slow to applaud, when our hands were out of view in the descending lift Frank Grimes and I clapped loudly and the applause was taken up by the entire house. Hard enough having to play to them without having to do their work as well.
I grew to love playing in the Abbey Theatre, although you’d get better acoustics in a ball alley. Actors had to keep their voices above the normal projection level or those sitting under the balcony would never know how the story was going. Much as I liked the work, opening nights down the years proved something of a disappointment. It has long been the practice for managements to paper the house for these occasions. Who were invited? Friends of the theatre, I suppose. Shareholders and board members, many from the press, people likely to give publicity to the event. A sprinkling from radio and television. Somebody seeing a group of RTÉ personnel going into the theatre on opening night remarked, ‘A pilgrimage to Knock!’ There must have been something in that, because a play that got an outstanding reaction from preview audiences could fall flat on its face on press night. On occasion one even sensed a mild hostility out there in the darkness.
After The Saint and Mary Kate, The Playboy of the Western World was revived. In my earlier years I had played Christy, ‘a young gaffer who’d capsize the stars,’ but, in the words of the Widow Quin, I had ‘aged a score’ and now I was cast as Christy’s father, Old Mahon. Vincent Dowling was the Playboy, Aideen O’Kelly Pegeen Mike, and Maire Ní Dhomhnaill the Widow Quin. Hers was a superbly gamesome widow, and when she came to coax Christy with, ‘Come on young fellow till you see my little houseen a perch off on the rising hill,’ she didn’t say ‘house-een’ but gave the word the full Gaelicised flavour of ‘howish-een’ which Synge, the eavesdropper, had heard in Kerry.
Harry Brogan and Mícheál Ó Briain played Jimmy Farrell and Philly Cullen. Tomás MacAnna, a wizard at moving crowds on a large stage, turned in a spectacular production which went to the Edinburgh Festival. Our venue there was the Lyceum Theatre. This was at a time when national anthems were played before the rise of the curtain. ‘The Soldier’s Song’ was first on the turntable. Not everyone recognised it. Half the audience got to their feet. When those standing saw the other half seated they decided they had made a mistake and began to sit down, but by this time those seated thought it was they who had made the mistake and were now getting to their feet and breaking into what one critic called ‘uncivilised hilarity’; and so they went up and down like jacks-in-the-box until all were standing and trying to suppress their merriment. Then ‘The Soldier’s Song’ ended and people were settling themselves and reaching for the chocolates, when suddenly the strains of ‘God Save the Queen’ filled the house, to be greeted, as the audience struggled to stand, with a hilarity as uncivilised as that which had greeted ‘The Soldier’s Song’.
The incident did the play no harm and the curtain went up to a laughing audience. One paper next day reproached that same audience for their lack of reverence for ‘God Save the Queen’, but we got a good press. ‘Richness’, ‘Devastating’ and ‘Splendours’ were some of the headings in the Scotsman. ‘Synge drew a glorious picture of a browbeaten boy discovering his pride and trying to justify the myth he had created. The devastating climax when hero-worship turns to scorn has been vividly handled by Tomás MacAnna in this production … Vincent Dowling’s Playboy was a fine study of bewilderment and bravado. He came out of the night a hunched and pathetic waif and found himself transformed into a hero.’
Other papers praised Geoffrey Golden (Michael James), Mícheál Ó Briain (Philly Cullen), Patrick Laffan (Shaun Keogh) and Máire Ní Dhomhnaill. In the part of Old Mahon I was described by Christopher Small of the Glasgow Herald as ‘large, hairy, as powerful as a gorilla and much less amiable’. John Calder of the Daily Mail said: ‘Vincent Dowling as the Playboy and Aideen O’Kelly as Pegeen Mike headed a cast which stormed through a memorable first night like inspired banshees.’ And of Harry Brogan’s Jimmy Farrell he penned ‘the most diabolically comic drunk I have ever seen paralytic on a stage’.
In Act Three of the Playboy, at the entry of Harry and Mícheál Ó Briain after getting into ‘such staggers’ at a morning wake, Harry rattles the latch very noisily. Jerkily the door opens just a little, and one leg, snake-like, investigates the kitchen air before the entire person appears, so full that he is fit to spill. Harry and Mícheál talk about graves and Harry asks Mícheál if he has ever heard tell of ‘the skulls they have in the city of Dublin; ranged out like blue jugs in a cabin of Connaught … white skulls, and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some of them having the full teeth and some having only but one.’
Here Harry holds up, at the end of an outstretched left hand, two fingers. Eyes shut, he rests momentarily. Then, opening one bleary eye and seeing the two fingers raised, he reaches out with his other hand, as fast as is possible under the weight of drink, puts down one finger and wags the other. It is a marvellous piece of grotesquerie in comic hands with sickle-moon thumbs and never fails to make the house erupt.
He told me once how he came across this piece of business. It seems when Harry came to the Abbey first, Lennox Robinson was directing the Playboy. When the actor playing Harry’s part came to the ‘skulls’ speech he was shut-eyed, simulating drunkenness, and he raised two digits saying, ‘some of them having the full teeth and some having only but one’. ‘But,’ Lennox called out, ‘you have got two fingers up.’ Whereupon the actor opened his eyes and put one of them down, to the amusement of the crew. ‘Keep it in,’ Lennox told him.
Harry, like the actors of his time, was fond of talking about the old days. Acting is a craft and, like Michelangelo’s apprentices, novices learn as much from the master’s tales as from watching him perform. But the stage wasn’t the be-all and end-all for Harry. He was a committed republican from the way he talked, and the Countess Markiewicz was his heroine. John Bull was the enemy and Harry was reluctant to play in London. ‘The heart of a rotten empire,’ he called it.
When we were in Edinburgh, Phil O’Kelly, our manager, brought the entire cast to a festival news conference held in the freemasons’ hall in George’s Street. Phil put on what one newspaper man called a céilí for the press, by asking the players to do a party piece or talk about the theatre. I told a story which was synopsised in next day’s Glasgow Herald, and Gabriel Fallon gave a potted history of the Abbey. We would not have an Abbey Theatre were it not for the resurgence of the national spirit at the turn of the century, he claimed, and had it not been for the Abbey Theatre the Easter Rising might not have taken place when it did.
There was vocal agreement from Harry on this, and when he himself got up to speak, with a heavy eye he surveyed his surroundings and said, ‘The last time I was in a Freemasons’ hall I was raiding it!’ He went on to encourage the Scots to engage in a militant nationalism.