Making The Ballroom of Romance in Co Mayo: ‘Even passing it today, I still think I can hear the music in it’

“Will you go into the field, Bridie?”

Does that sentence strike some memory: the stilted invitation, a rural locality, a woman’s name?

This much-quoted line from director Pat O’Connor’s atmospheric made-for-television 1982 movie of The Ballroom of Romance is not actually in William Trevor’s original short story. Bowser Egan, played by John Kavanagh, did not ask Bridie (whose surname we never learn), played by Brenda Fricker, into a Mayo field after an evening spent dancing in a ballroom marooned like a ship in an ocean of bog.

Everything else about the 52-minute movie, which was a BBC production in association with RTÉ, is an exquisite tribute to the authenticity of Trevor’s story. It’s a portrait of a rural community in mid-century Ireland, who come together once a week in a ballroom, to dance, and to dream, and to realise eventually how relentlessly time passes.

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It is 8am on a summer morning when my car draws up outside the permanently closed Cleary’s Bar on Ballycroy’s only street. The sky is the colour of steel, and the heavy rain and wandering fog create the illusion of winter. There is only one other car in view. It belongs to Michael Gallagher, who is originally from this area, and who has offered to drive me around some of the locations used in the movie. Gallagher, then 12, was an extra.

“You were supposed to be 14 to get hired as an extra,” Gallagher confesses, as we start to drive in his car across the acres of blanket bog that cover this part of Mayo. “I remember well telling that lie.” The young fibber was paid £9 a day.

As Gallagher tells it, Pat O’Connor had got the funding to make the movie, but was still in search of a location, when he landed into Cleary’s pub one day. A rural dance hall was crucial. It was in the pub, or so the story goes, that O’Connor was told of Corrigan’s Hall, only a few miles away; a former dance hall, now closed.

O’Connor must not have believed the perfection of the building that he subsequently found, and its location. He needed a building that could pass as a dance hall, and found an actual rural dance hall. More than that, he found in its hinterland men and women who had danced there in the past; some of whom had found their life-partners there, just as in Trevor’s story. These were the people he was to recruit as extras: the people who had lived the reality described in a piece of fiction.

The former Corrigan’s dance hall – currently for sale for €50,000 – is now approaching an advanced stage of dereliction, but it still commands the landscape around it. It’s easy to understand the importance it held for decades as a weekly social hub within a widely scattered community. We walked around it in the arrowing rain, the long grass soaking our shoes. There is a broken window at the back, through which we peered and saw the fireplace beside which Mrs Dwyer (May Ollis), wife of the dance hall owner, made the sandwiches to be eaten during the interval of the dance. I felt a frisson of something looking in that ruined window; literally looking into a past era.

Later that day, I interview Bridgie Togher. In the 1950s – the era in which the story is set – she and her husband William managed this same dance hall. He did the door, and she made the tea and sandwiches, put out biscuits on plates and served up minerals for the interval. No alcohol was served, and thus young teenagers also attended.

“There was a wonderful maple floor in there. People came from long distances. Crossmolina, Castlebar, Newport, Achill and all over Erris,” she recalls. “They cycled, or shared cars, and some even came by boat from Erris.”

Dances were not allowed on Saturday nights, possibly due to Sunday morning Mass. They were held instead on Fridays or Sundays, but the big night was always Friday. Doors opened at 9pm, and the dancing could continue until 3am, with a live band playing. It was five shillings in, and capacity was 300.

Bridgie played an extra in the movie, as did her husband. “We relived our dancing days in that ballroom when they were filming, we were there every day dancing, it brought us back to when we were dancing there ourselves. We used to dance quickstep, foxtrot, old time waltzes.”

How did people in rural Ireland in the 1950s know how to dance a foxtrot?

“There was a lot of emigration from the parish and when people returned in the summer or at Christmas, the returned emigrants showed others how to dance,” she explains.

Emigration is a theme that underlies the story of The Ballroom of Romance: Bridie has seen her erstwhile dance partner leave for England (who was played in flashback by Bridgie’s son, Liam). Emigration was a reality in the Ballycroy parish too. Michael Gallagher’s father, Pat, who played the part of the memorably named Man with the Long Arms, and who still lives in Ballycroy, was the youngest of nine. His father died when Pat was 12. All eight of his siblings had emigrated, and Pat remained at home, to take care of his mother.

Pat Gallagher is 83 now. He spent many Friday nights dancing in Corrigan’s dance hall before he returned there to play The Man with the Long Arms in the movie; a character who doesn’t have a speaking part, but who commands the attention of many women present.

“The atmosphere was brilliant,” he recalls of his pre-movie dancing days. “We’d be looking forward to it all week; the night the dance would be on. You’d be shining your shoes for half an hour before you’d leave the house. You’d put on a full suit, shirt and tie. The place would be packed, and there would always be live music. Moonlight in Mayo, The Boys from the Co Mayo. They are the ones that most stuck in my mind. Some people would cycle up to 25 miles to the dance, from the surrounding parishes. The national anthem was always played at the end of the night.”

The ballroom had closed by the time the film-makers came to town. Gallagher heard that they were set up in the old community centre, recruiting extras, and decided to go along, since all anyone was talking about was the presence of the people from the movies. “I had heard the neighbours talking about it.”

He’s an older man now, but Gallagher still has a striking face, with noticeable cheekbones. He caught the attention of the casting crew immediately when he walked in. He was approached and told: “‘We are looking for a certain type of person and when you walked in, we thought this was it.’ I said I’d give it a go. I was supposed to be a farmer up in the fields, building stone walls, and lifting the rocks had lengthened my arms.”

He loved being in the movie, which, after it came out, was played each summer in the community centre, when emigrants returned home on holiday. He did not know at the time that The Ballroom of Romance would be judged as a classic piece of film-making; a perfect time capsule of a community and a place; one that effortlessly mixed fiction and reality. Gallagher still thinks of the movie every time he sees the former dance hall. “Even passing it today, I still think I can hear the music in it.”

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Tony Chambers, who played the saxophone as a band member in the movie, had actually played on Corrigan’s opening night, three decades previously. Mick Lally, who was cast as the eye-afflicted Dano Ryan, played the drums. Marty Murray a musician in real life, and the late husband of Geraldine Murray, was another band member, playing the accordion.

Geraldine played an extra, as did their daughter, Mary, who had one speaking line: the equivalent of being a star among the local extras. It was a scene in the women’s toilets – the real dance hall toilets – and her line was, “He’s dancing with Cat Bolger”. (The “he” was the mysterious Man with the Long Arms.)

“We were paid £18 a day,” Mary recalls. “I was 14. I remember going shopping after it was all over – I spent all my money on clothes and shoes, of course.”

The women recall the catering tent that was set up at the back of the hall. There were no trailers for the actors in rural Mayo. Cyril Cusack, Niall Tóibín (Eyes Horgan), Mick Lally, Bríd Brennan (Patty Byrne), Ingrid Craigie (Eenie Mackie), John Kavanagh and Joe Pilkington (Tim Daly) all ate at trestle tables with the local cast of extras. Kavanagh, Tóibín, and Pilkington often drank together in the evenings in Cleary’s pub, which was where the pub scene in the movie was filmed.

The pub is now closed, and also for sale. The Murrays are not sure what happened to the many photographs from the filming that were on the walls there for decades, and which used to be a tourist attraction for people seeking out the location.

They talk for a while about what making the movie meant to the community at the time. For Mary, who had been to Dublin just once in her short life at that point, the attendant glamour of cameras, catering and famous actors in her rural home place was indescribably exciting. It showed her horizons and possibilities she had never considered.

They were shooting the last scenes and we could feel the grief coming upon us at what we were going to lose. The movie was the biggest thing that ever happened to us in Ballycroy

—  Michael Gallagher

“It made the community here maybe more confident in themselves and believe that they could do more for themselves,” she says. “People in country areas didn’t have so much belief they could do things. I think it helped my confidence a lot. A lot of the people involved in the film were locals, but the actors and lighting and sound people were not, and it made you realise there were a lot of people out there who had come into our Mayo world.”

Michael Gallagher, who lied about his age in order to be cast as an extra, has never forgotten those weeks when Ballycroy and its environs was a film set. He cites those weeks, in which he assiduously trailed round after the film crew when not in his own scenes, as some of the happiest of his entire life. Many of his peers were to emigrate. “The population now is about half of what it was at that time.”

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He recalls the final night of filming. “They were shooting the last scenes and we could feel the grief coming upon us at what we were going to lose. The movie was the biggest thing that ever happened to us in Ballycroy. We are perhaps afraid to praise ourselves in Mayo, but the movie made us feel part of the wider world.”

Before it aired on television, the movie was shown to the local community in the dance hall. Gallagher was there. “It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. The hall was packed. We were watching the film in the place where it had been made. Even then I got how special the experience was. I saw dad up on the screen, and mum in a dancing scene. I was banking all that to tell a story about it later in life. That was a huge story to tell people.

“And at the end, the best thing was, in the credits, the people of Ballycroy were thanked. Our name was out there in the world.”

The Ballroom of Romance rated: A Janus-headed gem that still pricks the tear ducts

Chief Film Correspondent Donald Clarke gives his assessment of The Ballroom of Romance

★★★★☆

It says something about the rareness of Irish features in the early 1980s that the most discussed domestic title of the era – still much chewed over in academic circles – was actually a 52-minute television drama co-produced by RTÉ and the BBC. (The adaptation of William Trevor’s story won a Bafta in the TV section, not in the cinema categories.)

For all that, Pat O’Connor’s The Ballroom of Romance deserves its place in Irish cinema history. You couldn’t exactly call the intimate drama lavish, but there is a richness to the images that was rare in contemporaneous television. The heartbreaking central performance by Brenda Fricker carries a particular sadness that, a quarter of a century after the events depicted, still ran through rural Ireland. Emigration was torrential. A year before the referendum on the Eighth Amendment, the grip of the Catholic church remained firm. In 1982, this tale of lonely gatherings at a remote dance hall seemed almost contemporary. Fifteen years later, it felt as if it were taking place in the Dark Ages.

In one sense, however, The Ballroom of Romance looks to be pointing vigorously towards the future. Here is one of several places that the continuing boom in Irish film can be said to have begun. Seven years later, Fricker starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot and won an Oscar for her efforts. Pat O’Connor built on the acclaim to forge a busy career in the British and American film industries. He returned home for larger productions such as Circle of Friends and Dancing at Lughnasa.

It remains a Janus-headed gem that still pricks the tear ducts. Supporting turns from legends such as John Kavanagh, Mick Lally, Niall Tóibín, Bríd Brennan and Cyril Cusack could hardly be bettered. Talk about casting in depth.

Where can I watch it? Sadly, it’s not available to stream or to buy on DVD. See if any friends have it on a VHS. (Or it is currently available on YouTube)