With a new leading man, a rapidly thickening plot and a bad dose of first-night nerves, the curtain went up again yesterday on the greatest free show in town.
The current star of a revived The Flood Tribunal, now running at Dublin Castle, former assistant Dublin city and county manager George Redmond, was so nervous he repeatedly fluffed his lines.
Mr Pat Hanratty, highly convincing as senior counsel for the tribunal, asked Mr Redmond whether he had any other form of employment during his long career with Dublin County Council. The audience held its breath as the question was repeated five times and Mr Redmond made like a man with serious stage fright.
A prompt eventually came from Mr Redmond's solicitor. "Over the years I advised people . . ." he said enigmatically when he took centre stage again after a 10-minute interval. Some of his advice even earned him a £2,000 cheque, he said when pushed further, adding that he thought there was nothing inappropriate about that.
Comparisons with James Gogarty's stellar performance as The Flood Tribunal's Wily Octogenarian are inevitable and will mirror the debate about the merits of actor Michael Gambon's Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock compared to Donal McCann's. When they first met, Mr Redmond said, Mr Gogarty gave him tickets to a performance of The Borstal Boy at the Gaiety Theatre.
When his name was called, Mr Redmond emerged from the wings (an ante room) looking tanned and relatively relaxed. Showing no regard for the high-tech paraphernalia laid on by the tribunal's prop department, Mr Redmond rubbished the multimedia software that displayed ordnance images of much of the vast tract of land in north Co Dublin. Peering through spectacles at a television screen to his right, he called for "a real map, with all due respect to the technology".
There was no pleasing this temperamental performer. "I prefer the imperial," he sniffed imperially when Mr Hanratty informed him that a certain piece of land was 61.7 hectares. When after lunch some real maps were found he wasn't long in declaring them "defective". Mr Hanratty was making too big a deal of this thing, he declared, saying that the relevant information could be written down on a foolscap sheet in 20 minutes. "With a fountain pen." Naturally.
When the show was over Mr Redmond told director Mr Justice Flood that he would be willing to arrive in future at 10 a.m. rather than 10.30 a.m., and even give evidence during matinee performances on Sundays. "I don't want to be here for the rest of my life," he explained. But the show must go on and on and on . . .