Anyone who read the obituary of the writer Padraic O'Farrell in this newspaper recently must have been struck by the versatility, energy and enthusiasm of this man of many parts. I was reminded in particular of his wonderful collection of Irish theatrical and literary anecdotes, Green and Chaste and Foolish (Gill & Macmillan, 1994), emphasising the lighter side of page and stage.
Perhaps the strangest story in the book concerns George Bernard Shaw. After seeing a ballet in the Alhambra Theatre, London, in 1890, Shaw was entranced by the performance of one of the male dancers. He attended a post-performance celebration and on his way home decided to try to imitate the extraordinary movements of the dancer in Fitzroy Square. He was unaware that a policeman was watching as he pranced around gleefully, falling a dozen times or more.
Finally the constable demanded an explanation. Shaw was so enthusiastic in his description of the dancer that, instead of arresting or even reprimanding him, the policeman said: "Would you mind 'olding my 'elmet while I 'ave a go? It don't look so 'ard." Off he went around the square, falling and tearing his long overcoat but, though angry, he was determined not be beaten.
By now Shaw had decided it was time for a duet, so they hung their coats on a railing and off they went again.
They fell, they bled, they swore and they laughed until a police inspector arrived. At first he reprimanded his inferior but, on being dared to do as well as him, he joined the other two in pirouettes, entrechats, splits and staggers. Soon a milkman and a postman joined in the fun and they might have gathered a full ballet company had the milkman not fallen and broken his leg.
There are many other anecdotes in the book about Shaw, including the well-known occasion when his mordant wit found its match in Winston Churchill's.
At a time when Churchill was not doing too well politically, Shaw sent him some tickets for the opening night of one of his plays with the note that they were for "yourself and your friends - if you have any".
Churchill returned the tickets, explaining that he had a prior engagement, but expressed interest in acquiring some tickets "for a second
night - if there is one".
Another Irish Nobel laureate who features in the book is W.B. Yeats who told how, during one of the Playboy riots, J.M. Synge came to him and said: "A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly keep himself from jumping onto a seat and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease."
Years later, in March 1928, Sean O'Casey sent his new play The Silver Tassie to the Abbey directors, suggesting that it was his best work so far. But Yeats, Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson had expected another play similar to Juno and the Paycock or The Plough and the Stars. Yeats felt one should write about what one knows and so he replied to O'Casey: "You are not interested in the Great War. You never stood in the battlefields or walked the hospitals."
To this O'Casey replied: "Was Shakespeare at Actium or Phillipi? Was G.B. Shaw in the boats with the French, or in the forts with the British when Joan and Dunois made the attack that relieved Orleans? And someone, I think, wrote a poem about Tír na nOg who never took a header into the Land of Youth."
O'Farrell's book also retails a more recent snippet about another O'Casey play. The Gate Theatre brought Juno and the Paycock to the 1986 Jerusalem Festival. During Act I, Captain Boyle says: "Chiselurs don't care a damn about their parents." This was translated into Hebrew as: "Monumental sculptors don't care a damn about their parents."
Among other great men of the theatre featured by O'Farrell was the actor-manager Anew McMaster, who toured Ireland with his Intimate Shakespeare Company from the 1930s to the 1950s. He found extras as he needed them from the towns and villages where he played. The stage-manager had the job of rehearsing these, often only an hour or so before the curtain went up.
One such local youngster was recruited to play a messenger to McMaster's Macbeth. In Act V, Scene V, he entered and said nervously: "As I did stand my watch upon the hill,/ I look'd towards Birnam, and anon methought/ The wood began to move."
In his melodramatic way, McMaster grabbed the boy by the throat and threw him to the ground, shouting: "Liar and slave!"
Instead of reciting his next line, the terrified extra shouted: "Honest to Jaysus, Mr McMaster, that's what the fellow out there told me to say!"
The English playwright Harold Pinter got his first proper stage job on a two-year tour with McMaster's company. One time, when playing Bassanio to McMaster's Shylock, Pinter fluffed the line, "For thy three thousand ducats here is six", saying "buckets" instead of "ducats".
Completely seriously, and with emphasis on the mistaken word, McMaster continued, while the cast did their best to stifle any laughter: "If every bucket in six thousand buckets/ Were in six parts, and every part a bucket,/ I would not draw them; I would have my bond."
Rightly, the paying public
get a walk-on part in O'Farrell's collection. In March 1974, Chekov's Three Sisters was playing at the Abbey, while downstairs in the Peacock, Eamon Morrissey's one-man show, The Brother, was on. A lady rang the box office, which serves both theatres, to book tickets and was asked if they were for Three Sisters or The Brother.
"What are you talking about?" she asked. "They're for myself and my cousin."