For one week in June 1909 the American actor and comedian WC Fields performed at the Empire Palace Theatre on Dame Street in Dublin. It was later renamed the Olympia, writes Karl Whitney.
That week, the theatre played host to a variety show line-up that included - in addition to Fields - such luminaries as Johnny Walker, "the Scotch comedian" and the Lyric Mummers, a vocal group who sang operatic selections to the packed audience.
In June 1909, Fields was 29 years old. Already he had been touring as a "comedy juggler" for more than 10 years of his life: from coast to coast in the United States on the vaudeville circuit. He had crossed the Atlantic to play European dates when he was just 21; he performed at the Folies Bergères in Paris in 1901. Back then, he was far from the rotund contrarian whose bile-inflected mutterings would colour such classic comedy films as It's A Gift and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
One of his fellow performers on these circuits was a slightly older Hungarian-born escaplogist named Harry Houdini. While their paths crossed many times, they only played on the same bill once, in London.
It was an event that Fields never publicly commented on, preferring to embellish his resumé with exotic fantasies which included playing to the courts of empresses and kings.
If you watch Fields's masterpiece, The Bank Dick, made in 1940, you'd doubt his former career as an acrobat, on seeing him lumber inelegantly around screen. But in those later films there is more than the occasional deft comedy touch that betrays his physical skill: a carefully thrown hat that lands implausibly on the hook of a coat rack, a gun flicked nervously in the air, a baseball thrown aslant, knocking a policeman's helmet from his head. For the most part, the physical comedy that occurs in his films is a product of his years on the road perfecting his juggling act.
But back to that week in the Empire Theatre in June 1909: the Irish Times correspondent sent to review the week's programme noted in the paper of Wednesday June 23rd, that, while Arthur Slater, "the whistling man in white", was merely "acceptable", the "juggling feats performed by WC Fields were most interesting". The writer went on to note that the skill with which these juggling feats were executed "puzzled and amazed the audience".
Fields had perfected his act in front of many demanding audiences around the world, devising new routines as he travelled. One of Fields's trademarks was the Cigar Box trick, and it provides some insight into what his stage act must have actually been like. It was finally filmed in 1934 as a scene for the movie The Old-Fashioned Way.
About a dozen wooden cigar boxes are lined up by Fields on the floor in the centre of the stage. He pushes the boxes closer together and two boxes in the centre of the row leap up, seemingly of their own volition. Fields swats these boxes aside, impatiently. Fields then picks up the row of boxes, drops them, picks them up again, and balances them at an impressive right angle. Eventually, he juggles three of the boxes, shuffling the middle box, spinning it, using the other two to pick it up and hold it. In a final fit of frustration, Fields throws the boxes to the ground, to the whoops and hollers of the audience. A kid cracks him in the face from a distance with a tomato.
The curtain falls.
Through all this, Fields adopts a strictly nonchalant air, a sort of gum-chewing insouciance that he brought to most of his screen roles.
But his ability and skill are never in any doubt.
Fields travelled with a suitcase full of books: novels by Dickens and Twain, colourful comedies whose boisterous spirit Fields would later transmute into his picturesquely named characters onscreen: Harold Bissonette in It's A Gift, Mr Snaveley in the classic short, The Fatal Glass of Beer, Egbert Sousé in The Bank Dick. One can imagine Fields, largely self-educated, using the weeks spent travelling to and from Europe, and across America by train, reading - immersing himself in the world of Dickens's London. Indeed, later Fields was to directly engage his chicanery in the service of Dickens with his turn as Mr Micawber in George Cukor's 1935 screen version of David Copperfield.
The American juggler who had them gasping in awe in the Empire Palace Theatre back in 1909 would go on to have a colourful career as one of America's greatest humorists. Hailed by his comic contemporaries such as Groucho Marx, Fields's brilliance can still be plainly felt in his short and feature films. His sharp physical comedy often remains unremarked upon, possibly because of his matchless verbal dexterity.
Initially seen as the next Charlie Chaplin, Fields proceeded to carve out an oeuvre which was all his own. He directed one of his own films, and wrote his own scripts under a variety of names (Mahatma Kane Jeeves was one memorable pseudonym).
Fields was to return once more to perform in Dublin, playing the Theatre Royal in the last week of July in 1911. By that time, there was a new sensation in town, one that would ultimately spell the end of vaudeville theatre, but one that would make WC Fields's career: a cinema club had opened in the Round Room of the Rotunda, and everyone was talking about it. His first film, the comedy short, Pool Sharks, was made four years later.