Stage struck

PETER CRAWLEYon what separates us from the beasts

BRIAN FRIEL'S Faith Healer, currently touring in a Town Hall Theatre Galway production, is many things: a cerebral memory play, a high- wire act of monologue drama. It also provides some vivid insights into the mind of performers.

What do the greats such as Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin have in common, asks the Cockney talent agent Teddy. Talent, ambition and unswerving stupidity, he answers.

Teddy gives the example of one of his clients, a sensational bagpiper named Rob Roy, whose determination and constant rehearsing caused his early death (from pulmonary exhaustion), but who was so “educationally subnormal” that he once viciously attacked a beautiful partner. “Oh my God,” concludes Teddy. “Artists!”

Rob Roy was a breed apart. In fact, he was a dog. “How many times in your life has it been your privilege to hear a three-year old male whippet dog play Come Into the Garden, Maud on the bagpipes and follow his encore with Plaisir d’Amour?”

Well, actually, Teddy, now that you ask, never. But if current practices are anything to go by, the privilege may yet be ours.

The Abbey currently has two productions featuring animal performers: Carmel Winter’s B for Baby, touring under the imagination-sparking warning, “This performance includes partial nudity and a live snake”; and Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, with the no-less curious disclaimer, “This production contains nudity and a live animal on stage”.

Sensitive readers should know that, yes, the latter involves an act of animal husbandry, but only in the sense that Larry the lamb was bred out of season.

Teddy’s speech is a comic tour de force, yet it grazes around a long-sustained slur against the acting profession, who rightly get their hackles up when reduced

to animal metaphors: merely “parrots” or “trained seals”. “I did not say that actors were cattle,” Alfred Hitchcock once famously clarified. “I said that they should be treated like them.”

Listen to the opening moments of Pan Pan's All That Fall, in which a cast of terrific actors imitate a chorus of animal noises ("Sheep, bird, cow, cock, severally, then together"). Ask yourself whether it's an appropriately Beckettian gag or simply revenge. The real danger of working with animals is not being pecked or bitten, as anyone who worked on John McColgan's The Shaughraun knows. It's being upstaged.

It’s only human of us to anthropomorphise other species, especially when they’re cast members, which made it all the more unsettling when Gate director Michael Colgan had the original title performers of 2009’s The Birds unceremoniously culled. (They got flu.)

At least human actors have better career prospects. Larry will shortly retire to a farm, the Abbey’s de facto animal wrangler John Stapleton told me. But when I asked a more facetious Fiach MacConghail about Larry’s future, he seemed to have some juicy parts in mind. “Chops!”