by Eamon Kelly
At the curtain the house came down. We all felt we wanted to say: ‘We love you! Thanks a million!’ and Niall Tóibín, stepping forward, did just that, very gracefully and in Russian, ending with ‘Spaseeba! Spaseeba! Bolshoi spaseeba!’
Sunday morning, 21 February, we were all set to go to the circus, but at the last moment tickets became available for the Bolshoi Theatre. We opted for the ballet, myself a little sadly, being an old circus fan, and it also meant that I missed my last chance of riding the Moscow Metro that everyone talks about. We went off then in great glee to the Bolshoi to find that it was ‘opera morning’: not seeing the world famous ballet on its home ground was a disappointment.
The Bolshoi Theatre’s classic exterior, with an equine group dashing forth from above the apex of the tympanum, was but a foretaste of the theatre inside, cathedral-like in its majesty, with a great proscenium opening and a hammer-and-sickle patterned curtain. A loge skirted the entire wall and five balconies were shelved up along the side walls, with a huge box centre back and two other boxes, one on either side of the stage. Everything was decorated and gilded and there was a painted ceiling. In such beautiful and painstakingly restored theatres I felt that the drama, ballet and opera had taken the place of religion. The people were streaming in this bright Sunday morning when devout parishioners in Listowel were pounding the flags to Mass.
We nearly overslept the day we went home. Martin Fahy rang just as the porters were calling for our luggage at 4.15 a.m. Luckily the two large bags had been packed since the previous night. We had a hectic half hour to get ready and appear down at the exit. We made it. John Costigan had our passports and tickets and more forms to fill – currency declarations and again the old questions. Any weapons? Any ammunition? Any antiques? No! But there were many sore heads after our last night in Moscow and only a few hours in bed. The porter pressed a Lenin badge into my palm and I pressed some roubles into his. Eventually we were in the coach and had a long drive through the falling snow and Moscow’s sleeping suburbs. Snowploughs driving at a furious rate cleared the roads to the airport.
The customs, even with the help of the kindly glasnost girls, turned out to be very slow. And judging by the scrutiny and long delay at the passport counter, it’s no cakewalk getting out of Russia. We were shepherded from pen to pen and finally our bags went off, jauntily I felt, along the conveyor belt, as anxious as ourselves to be going home. Then came a surprise, a very welcome breakfast from our hosts, and in no time we were on our Aeroflot plane bound for Leningrad. The trip took an hour, an hour’s wait, and then the high skies to Shannon.
We were not allowed off the plane at Leningrad, and we sat out the hour on the runway. Sixty to a hundred college boys and their teachers from St Fintan’s High School in Sutton joined us there. It sounded like home already as youthful Irish voices were raised in every section of the plane. We took off at 10.10 a.m. It’s a three-hour trip, and Ireland is three hours behind in time. We raced the sun but never beat it. It cast the same shadow in Shannon as it had in Leningrad.
Another shadow fell. And our spirits sagged a little. On picking up the Irish morning papers we found that the summing up of our historic visit to the Soviet Union was greatly at variance with our collective experience.
We were home!
ALONE IN THE MOTHER HOUSE
In October 1990 I took part in a Sense of Ireland week in London. I played in the Riverside Studio at Hammersmith. Out walking from the hotel the night before, I lost my way. I called to a man in front and when he heard my voice he quickened his step. Then he stopped and, turning back, he asked me if I was Éamon Kelly. We walked along and went into a pub, and he told me that when he was a youngster in rural Ireland his job was to stand at the kitchen door and, when I came on the radio in The Rambling House, to call his mother, who was milking the cows, to hear me.
It was strange, he said, hearing my voice in a London street. At first he thought it was a ghost, which was why he had hastened his step. He told me that his mother and the people of her generation wouldn’t miss me on the radio for anything. He turned his head and, gazing past me, he said, ‘I was home to her funeral only last week.’
Next morning bright and early I was at the Riverside Studio. Michael Doyle had come over from the Abbey with me, and my set and stage furniture had been shipped across. We set up the scene and in the afternoon while I was resting Michael lit it. That night we opened. There was a great crowd.
I always manage to draw a hearty laugh in the first minute. It relaxes them. When I was telling the story of Fr McGillicuddy and the first motor car seen in our parish, an almighty clap of thunder broke directly overhead. I waited, looking up into the flies until the noise was dying away, and then I said, ‘God is getting vexed with me!’ The house came down.
Maura and I stayed at the Tara Hotel where we were made very welcome by my friend Eoin Dillon the manager. Bosco Hogan was there. His show I am Ireland, about W. B. Yeats was coming into the Riverside Studio after me. We ran into Brian Friel and Patrick Mason. Brian’s play Dancing at Lughnasa was opening in the National the next week.
After the run, when I came back to Dublin, Noel Pearson, the then artistic director of the Abbey, asked me to see him. The current play in the theatre had opened to the father and mother of a lambasting from the critics. The stalls were practically empty. Would I take over with my one-man show at the Abbey for a few weeks?
It was a tall order and at first nearly knocked the wind out of me. It was all right doing a one-man show in the Peacock, in London or America, but the Abbey – the sacred stomping ground of poets and playwrights! Then I said to myself, what the heck? I had a show fresh in my mind and if it did well in London it should do better in the Abbey.
The name of the one-man show was English That for Me, about the time when Irish was being supplanted by the foreign tongue in my native place. It had the heartbreak, the high comedy and the misunderstandings of such a set of circumstances.
Maura encouraged me to go ahead, though my son Brian said I was taking on too much at seventy-six. I did it. Some nights I was put to the pin of my collar to keep going, but strength came after a plea went skywards to relieve me in my hardest hour, and I kept the doors of the Abbey open until Field Day took over with The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney.
As someone reminded me, I had made a little bit of history that night. I was the first Abbey actor to do a one-man show in the mother house.
It was after Noel Pearson that Garry Hynes came to us as artistic director. Being away from the theatre quite a bit, I didn’t figure in too many of her shows, though she did nearly put a halt to my gallop as an actor by miscasting me as Uncle Peter in her ever so controversial production of The Plough and the Stars. I refused to do the part when approached, but she got round me. After the first reading of the play I kicked over the traces when I saw that it wasn’t working for me. I came home and wrote two letters; one to Martin Fahy the theatre manager, tendering my resignation from the company, and the other to Garry Hynes to the effect that I didn’t feel happy in the part. I was going out the door to put the letters in the post when the phone rang. It was Garry, and I’ll say this much for her, for a small parcel of humanity she is mighty persuasive. She talked me out of the decision I had made by dint of praise and cajolery.
On opening night, in a cast of shaved heads and some tongues with vague echoes of Belfast, Galway and west Munster, maybe I wasn’t entirely out of place. There were Dubliners on stage too, but ne’er a sign of a faded Georgian casement or arched doorway to give the tang of a tenement house. Mollser the consumptive child sat at the corner of a raked stage catching the sun with a mug in her hand:
‘Mollser, oul’ son. What are you drinkin’? Milk?’
‘Grand, Fluther. Grand thanks. Tis milk.’
‘You couldn’t get a betther thing down you.’
Furniture brought on to the same space gave the effect of an interior. The setting was very different from those of the O’Casey play
s we had seen down the years. Old-timers hated the production and the Irish Times nearly had a fit. But there were many who loved Garry’s very different look at the great man’s work, with the stress on poverty and on suffering.
At rehearsals, when I settled down to accepting my role as Uncle Peter, I enjoyed working with Garry. She was often inspired and always inspiring, and the Holy Ghost descended on her many times during the weeks of preparation. She didn’t believe in leaving well alone. Frank O’Connor once told me that he could never re-read even his best short story without wanting to change it. That same itch for change motivated Garry. When she had set a scene, if you went to the loo, you came back to find it completely altered. Where before you had entered from the stair landing, you now came up through a trap-door in the floor, as the auxiliaries did in The Plough and the Stars. You could never be up to her.
In our last play together, which was The Colleen Bawn at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, Myles na Gopaleen descended from the flies to land on the lake shore in Killarney! Playing Fr Tom, the poitín priest in The Colleen Bawn, and watching the plot develop, I couldn’t help thinking that in many ways John B. Keane was heir to Boucicault. As in John B.’s plays, Boucicault’s characters are colourful and his dialogue comes trippingly off the tongue. The Colleen Bawn is set by the lakes of Killarney, and for me who was born near there the language of Boucicault, though not as authentic as that of Keane, is racy of the soil.
That’s my story. My journeying is over. I am eighty-four and my next trek will be through the stars to the great beyond, where I hope to meet again those I knew in my wanderings down here: those with whom I shared the craftsman’s bench, those who taught me and those I taught in my spell in the classroom, those whose voices rode the radio waves with mine, and finally those with whom I strutted my merry hour upon the stage.
If the humour takes us and there’s a playwright handy, Hilton Edwards or the Abbey’s Frank Dermody may be tempted to direct a show in some celestial alhambra, where angels with folded wings will sit in the stalls, applaud politely and maybe come round after and say, ‘That was great!’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Éamon Kelly
Éamon Kelly (1914 - October 24, 2001) was an Irish actor and author. He was born in Sliabh Luachra, County Kerry, Ireland. Both an actor and storyteller, he became a member of the RTÉ actors group, Radio Éireann Players, in 1952. He is best known for his performances of storytelling on stage, radio, and television. As an actor, he worked extensively with both the Gate Theatre and Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He was also nominated for a 1966 Tony Award in the category Actor, Supporting, or Featured (Dramatic) for his role in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come.
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