The Irish ‘Chimes’ – An Irishman’s Diary about a night at the theatre (and cinema)

During an orgy of high culture at the weekend, I went from seeing Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight in the Irish Film Institute to Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert at the Gate. Actually, there was a short interlude of low culture in between – watching the second half of the FA Cup final in a pub. But I had barely lowered my brows there before it was time to raise them again for the theatre.

The journey from the cinema to the Gate is of course a microcosm, in reverse, of Welles's career. As everyone knows, the Dublin theatre was his springboard to celluloid immortality. And his reputation for genius was already global by the time he made Chimes at Midnight, 35 years later, although that too had origins in Dublin.

Welles long toyed with the idea of amalgamating the several Shakespeare plays in which the character features in a sort-of Sir John Falstaff’s greatest hits, with him in the lead. In 1960, he staged a version in Belfast, and then Dublin – thereby ending his theatrical career in the city it began. A few years later, he made the film in Spain.

He had grown into the comic part in every sense by then. Not only was his fame global, so was his body shape. In fact some critics thought him too fat for Falstaff, a character who did after all have to fit into a suit of armour while pretending to fight. But physiognomically at least, Welles was faultless. He had, circa 1965, a face to launch a thousand quips. And speaking of brows, high or low, his magnificently athletic pair deserved an Oscar for best supporting body part.

There were powerful performances of an entirely different kind in The Gigli Concert, where Denis Conway's unnamed "Irish man" plumbed spectacular emotional depths and dragged Declan Conlon's English quack psychologist with him before they both made it back to the surface intact. The production deserves the praise showered on it by this and other papers' drama critics.

But not for the first time at the Gate, I was amused by the pre-show warnings about what might happen to people who didn’t turn their mobiles off. The gist of this one was that, while the theatre would never condone violence against those whose phones erupted at sensitive moments, it would certainly understand it.

And I’m almost sure the lady two seats to my left joined me in laughing at this. But like many people, she could no more switch her phone off completely than she could her own life-support machine. She switched it to silent instead. So when it vibrated loudly later during one of the play’s many sensitive moments, I felt a responsibility to police the incident in the manner the theatre expected.

Of course actual violence was out of the question. But I needed to teach the offender a lesson. So, steeling myself, I first arched an eyebrow in sub-Wellesian manner, suggesting irony or sarcasm. Then I flashed a stern glance at the woman – or to be exact, at the back of the seat in front of her. If that didn’t teach her, nothing will.

One of curiosities of Chimes at Midnight, by the way, is the accent of Margaret Rutherford's innkeeper, Mistress Quickly.

At the start of the film, I was locating it somewhere around Gloucestershire. But it continued to migrate westwards. By the end, it was definitely in Ireland.

Maybe this was Welles’s suggestion. It was hardly Shakespeare’s, even if the name he gave her was more for the purposes of hinting at professional rather than geographic origins. My copy of the play says the name may have been a deliberate contraction of “Quick Lay”, and that even if it wasn’t, an Elizabethan synonym of “quickly” – ie “lively” – meant much the same thing.

In any case, by impure coincidence, the weekend also found me reading an extract from a new biography of Peg Plunkett, an 18th-century Dubliner who was notorious in her day as the madam of one the city’s leading bawdy houses.

Her client list included judges and bishops. But she also won the lucrative contract to be mistress of Charles Manners, the lord lieutenant, giving rise to a story that if it isn’t true, should be.

His was the sort of surname that comic playwrights made up back then. And the joke was on him one night in Smock Alley, when Plunkett told the audience off – and told them all – simultaneously. Her cue was wags in the crowd inquiring loudly who her latest celebrity customer was. Whereupon, according to the book, she retorted: “Manners, you blackguards, Manners.”

@FrankmcnallyIT