Ah! Glorious memories! I railed at the crowd, reminding them of our Fenian dead; they listened, dumbfounded. I was Pádraig Pearse, it was the Easter Rising, I felt the blood - mainly other people's - rush to my head. Then I was bristling wee Keir Hardie, and finally I took flesh again as WB Yeats, brooding, vatic, poetic. It was great fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. Rehearsals and all.
On April 2nd this year I was brazenly proud to be a member of an assorted cast for a cut-down reading at Galway's Town Hall Theatre of the marvellous Non-Stop Connolly Show, the title itself cut down from The Non-Stop Connolly Show: A Dramatic Cycle of Continuous Struggle in Six Parts. My fellow thespians included real actors such as Sabina Higgins, wife of poet-politician Michael D Higgins and one-time actress with the Focus Theatre in Dublin.
My own ragtag acting skills were born in the Brendan Smith Academy days in Dublin and the late-lamented Lantern Theatre in Merrion Square; I was also shot during a crime re-enactment for RTÉ and I fell dead gorgeously. Among those reading were film-people, musicians, anyone who wanted to take a part. For this was a public reading as opposed to a truly rehearsed performance and the lovely haphazardness of it all added to a sense of involvement.
At the end of the show people were asked to come up and air their political and social views on just about anything. This was community theatre, public theatre.
Asked to do Pearse again - how some acquaintances of mine who accused me of being a unionist chiefly on the grounds that I was from Northern Ireland would have shivered at the thought - I agreed. But I am not free to be Pearse once more, alas, when his words tumble out into the salt Atlantic air of his beloved West of Ireland.
The Non-Stop Connolly Show arose out of the early 1970s and notions of street-theatre and community involvement. It was originally planned by authors John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy as a radio play but the gracious BBC rejected it in case it might "inflame passions in Ulster". Just as well it didn't go on, then.
Des Geraghty, now associated with Poetry Ireland, then with the ITGWU, suggested it could be put on at Liberty Hall. The idea had been to examine James Connolly's role in 1916 against a wider revolutionary struggle; the censorship mood of the day would also be challenged. Jim Sheridan directed, along with John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, and the play ran from Easter Saturday to the morning of Easter Sunday 1975; it was later performed at Queen's University and elsewhere, done as street theatre in segments, performed at Ed Berman's Almost-Free theatre in London as a series of one-hour readings lasting a month.
Eminent actors became associated with it, such as the impish and great character actor, Dudley G Sutton, sidekick to Ian McShane in the TV series Lovejoy. Ken Livingstone also had a part in one production in London. The work also played in the US.
John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy have been living and working in Galway for many years now, actively and creatively political. Arden's eminence as a novelist, story-writer and playwright is shamefully buried, to my mind, behind the tinpot din of Galway's glorification of insignificant but loud literary talents, if talents they be; Margaretta D'Arcy has worked with Arden on a number of works, such as The Hero Rises Up,(1968), The Island of the Mighty, (1972), the radio drama Keep the People Moving (1972) all the while keeping her own Radio Pirate Woman alive and well. As usual, Galway glosses over the true committed talent in her midst: perhaps in a conservative city, such activist creativity creates a certain discomfort? Easier, therefore, merely to be entertained.
But breathe a sigh of relief, Galway, for The Non-Stop is about to be whittled down even further. Shorter perhaps, but no less powerful.
On Sunday next, as a nod to the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, Treasa Ní Fhatharta of Teach Synge, Inis Meain, hosts The Life and Times of James Connolly - Songs and Speeches from The Non-Stop Connolly Show, by Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden. Treasa's great-uncle, Seán Ó Briain, took part in the Rising and was interned with Michael Collins at Stafford Gaol. Teach Synge is her family home, lovingly restored with a little museum and library. Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, as well as Synge, came there to learn Irish. It was once known as "Ollscoil na Gaeilge". The performance is free but donations to the upkeep of the house are welcome. It will take place outdoors ("indoors if it's wet", the poster endearingly states) starting at 1pm. This time the show will be read as a 90-minute piece.
Those interested can bang on down to the corner of Galway's Victoria Street and Merchants Road at 9. 30am for the bus to the Rossaveal boat at 10. 30am. The return boat leaves Inis Meain at 4. 30pm. Inquiries can be made to 091-565430 or to Treasa on the island, at 099-73036.