In the city of Dublin at no distant dateWe resolved on a 'Tóstal' - a sort of a fête -In the culture of Europe we wished to take partSo we made it a feast of theatrical art!Tooralay, tooraloo!And we got a few bob from the Fáilte board too. . .
The now distant date was 1957. The ballad, composed by Mr R.B.D. French, reader in English at Trinity College and a closet satirist, commemorating the first Dublin Theatre Festival, was performed in the Players' Theatre revue of that year. I happened to be chair of the Dublin University Players and was busily promoting myself to the managers of the profession to which I aspired. These were Hilton Edwards at the Gate, Godfrey Quigley of the Globe Theatre Company, Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift at the Pike Theatre Club and Ernest Blythe at the Abbey - I needn't have bothered with the last named.
One back-door entrée was to enrol as a volunteer helper for the festival. I had no difficulty in impressing Brendan Smith, the festival director, for I spoke (some) French and was therefore assigned as a stage-door gofer to assist Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire. I had seen some of Vilar's novel interpretations of the French classics on the vast open stage of the Palais de Chaillot - no scenery, just a black space on which actors in splendid costumes glowed in iridescent light. M. Vilar vexed Mr Smith by requesting that the Olympia stage be extended over the orchestra pit. This meant expenditure of money and also the inconvenience of having to pay the pit band for not performing - for M. Vilar's own musicians participated in his staging of Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire.
The Lord Mayor, Robert Briscoe, was to attend the opening night along with the French Ambassador. The Alliance Française supplied a tricolour to drape over the stage-right box; I was sent out to Hector Gray's to buy an Irish flag to hang out of the opposite box, and to Pigott's for a record of La Marseillaise. Mr Briscoe was due to meet the cast before the play.
I hesitantly suggested that it would be more usual for the presentation to happen afterwards when everyone would be, well, more relaxed, but Mr Smith declared it was too late to change the arrangements so the Lord Mayor was ushered into a dressing-room packed with gentlemen and ladies in various states of déshabillé, loudly crying "Merde!" and other vernacular salutations. Mr Briscoe bowed graciously, averting his eyes, and was led off through the evil-smelling corridors to the auditorium. The record of the French national anthem was played and everyone stood up, but when the spotlight was turned on the stage-right box there was no one in it, for the Ambassador had got lost on one of the Olympia's sinuous spiral stairways.
I had appeared at the Pike in a Sartre play and was intrigued to learn that Alan Simpson was to stage the European première of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo. This production stole all the reviews, much to the vexation of the mainstream managements, who regarded the Pike crowd as arty interlopers.
Harold Hobson, the doyen of British critics, singled out The Rose Tattoo as a "distinguished production, directed with outstanding discrimination. . ."
Then out from the wings stepped a big Civic Guard.
He said, "Tis immoral! - or so I have heard -
'Tis so shockin' obscene there's no question of bail'
- So he handcuffed young Simpson and took him to jail. . .
(Tooraloo, etc)
I rushed round to Herbert Lane after the Olympia finished each evening to join the freedom of speech brigade in the hope that we might have the opportunity of shouting insults at the cops and at the representatives of the Legion of Mary who were said to be behind this coup. Miss Anna Manahan, the star of the production, joined the throng wearing a purple overcoat. There were photographers, as someone remarked, "from every country of the world and other places too". We did not see much action, but we expressed our solidarity with management and cast.
Wearing my Voluntary Helper badge, I thought I might insinuate myself into a matinée of the Royal Ballet in Ninette de Valois's staging of Swan Lake. Miss de Valois arrived in a limousine and mounted the marble staircase of the Theatre Royal as if she were, indeed, royalty. "Where's your ticket?" demanded the doorman at the dress circle. "I didn't think I needed one!" replied she. "Ah now, Missus, no one gets in here that hasn't a ticket!" Mr Louis Elliman, the theatre's proprietor, suddenly appeared and shrivelled his doorman with a glance. Miss de Valois was far too well bred even to have noticed the slight.
The Gate produced The Old Lady Says 'No!' for the eighth time, with Micheál MacLíammóir (59) as Robert Emmet (24). The Abbey gave (guess what?) The Playboy and Juno. I wrote a scurrilous editorial in the TCD magazine Icarus asking if the festival had not heard of any young Irish writers. The Festival Council commissioned an adaptation of Ulysses for the 1958 festival, but Archbishop McQuaid declined to say a votive mass due to the programming of a new play by Sean O'Casey, and the spineless council cancelled the entire event.
By this time I was on tour with the Canadian Players in Montreal, delighted to have escaped from tatty, reactionary Dublin.
This year's Dublin Theatre Festival runs from September 28th to October 14th