No Business Like Show Business.

Short story from the pen of Thurles author & poet Tom Ryan ©

When Noel Coward tunefully advised Mrs Worthington to never put her daughter on the stage, he might have usefully told my late mother, Bridie, to do likewise with regards her eldest son, Tom.

Despite having a lifelong association with theatre, both amateur and professional, Thespian glory has eluded me. More often than not I have convinced the wide world that ‘Oscar material’, I ain’t.

Yet, despite the wry observation by the late, great Shakespearian actor, Anew McMaster, that Thurles is the “Graveyard of Drama”, (when he found himself playing to an audience of just two or three in Delahunty’s New Cinema many years ago), I am from a theatre-loving Thurles.

This home of the GAA, has produced many playwrights and many top actors and has featured with great honour at many of Ireland’s 36 Drama Festivals annually, including both the All-Ireland Open Drama Festival at Athlone and the All-Ireland Confined Finals in Rossmore, Cork and elsewhere.
Top Thurles Thespians include Margaret McCormack Purcell of Littleton, a village once referred to by Lord Haw Haw in his broadcasts from Germany during World War 2, and home town of leading musician, Warrant Officer Larry Slattery, latter first British Prisoner of War captured during that same war.
Margaret, a product of the Brendan Smith Theatre Academy, acted with the late great Siobhan McKenna in a professional production of Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World”. Margaret has produced and acted with both Thurles Drama Group and Holycross/Ballycahill Drama Group in Thurles, latter which hosts the popular annual Tipperary Drama Festival.

My own theatrical debut was at nine years of age, when at the invitation of a magician, I climbed up onto the stage of Delahunty’s Cinema. I was the only brave child to take up the invitation. However, I was no supporting actor for the strangely dressed and quite awesome looking showman. I was all cockiness and cheeky initially on stage until the magician handed me an illuminated skull in a glass jar. It frightened the wits out of me and I jumped off stage having first, cried “Mammy!”. Not the most memorable or indeed edifying of stage debuts. Though the magician mentioned my bravery as the only volunteer that night was to be noted by the heckling and hissing juveniles in the pit. No doubt some of these chappies are making it hot for politicians now.

Years later I was asked once again to take to the stage of a Dublin theatre, by a professional producer. I was nineteen years old and thought my play, “The Man of Principle” (or was it “The Plan of Battle”) was a masterpiece which any professional should feel obliged and thrilled to stage for heavens’ sake.
So I left it with the producer for a week. When I returned for his comments, he asked me up on stage and handed me the script of “Lady Chatterly” and asked me to read some lines. I think the lines indicated to the pretty young English actress opposite me that we should “go upstairs, darling.”

Well, imagine a harmless young man from the heart of rural Ireland back in the Nineteen Sixties featuring in that scenario? Sure, if they ever found out back home; I’d be read off the altar. So I was no “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” on this occasion.

Far from “Lady Chatterly” you were reared, boy. I laughed out loud and nervously, quite red-faced and embarrassed and as on the previous occasion, aforementioned, also jumped off the stage into the pit.

I declared this time, “It’s easier to write plays than act in them”, much to the amusement, I’m sure, of a puzzled producer who must have thought I was either there for an audition or was a nuisance fantasist. This happening was to be my first and last professional “audition”.

On a stage in Boherlahan I was a Redcoat disguised as a priest in ”The Croppy Boy.” At the decisive moment when I was to draw my wooden sword and arrest the “Croppy Boy”, I stumbled and I stabbed myself. It wasn’t the Croppy Boy who came a cropper on this less than august occasion on which self esteem of yours truly, suffered a gigantic setback.

On a stage in Templemore Town Hall, when musicians failed to turn up for a concert a few of us, in the absence of a script or indeed common sense, put on a play at a moment’s notice (literally), as a large audience, wondered when proceedings would truly get underway.
We wrote acted and sang Irish ballads, as we performed in impromptu fashion. All I can remember is uttering the immortal word, ‘Aye’, over and over again at every opportunity and prayed the show would soon end. People laughed all the time, anyway and to this day I am greeted by many in Templemore with that now famous one liner, “Aye”. Not exactly ‘Actors Equity’ glory, but fame of sorts.

Of course I think my acting career really began in the Thurles Boy Scout Troop. In my short- trousered days and wearing my blue cravat, tan and merit badge-covered shirt, to show off to the girls; I wrote what was intended to be a grim tragedy about the goings on in a farmhouse in a storm. You know – ‘The cows mooed’ (cue for me to do likewise), the ‘thunder flashed’ (Start lighting the match now, Sean) and so on and so on.
The idea was to strike immortal terror into the audience of parents, carol singers and fellow scouts in that darkened hall. Alfred Hitchcock was only trotting after us. However, imagine my utter shock and horror when those insensitive and unappreciative souls burst into uproarious and outrageous laughter. It pains me still to recall the utter humiliation of it all. I was too ashamed to show off my merit badges to any young ‘wans’, on that night. In fact my body still quivers and shivers when I observe Christmas carollers, every year, in the town’s Liberty Square, in Thurles.

I do, however, have happier and more sane theatre memories. I recall when a decent wise and multi-talented farmer friend, the late TK Dwyer of Littleton Muintir na Tire, staged my play “Children of the Nation”, which on this occasion brought tears to the eyes of the audience (for the right reasons, I add) at the Tipperary One Act Drama Festival, adjudicated by Niall O’Beachain.
Before taking to the stage TK, a playwright /poet also, presented me with a postal order “If we put on anybody else’s play we would have to pay royalties”, he said. Now, there was a wise and thoughtful man, encouraging an aspiring young writer. Treat a young person with dignity and they’ll respond. I like to think I have never forgotten the kindness and example set by that wonderful human being. I served with Thurles Drama Group as their Public Relations Officer once and also with New Malden Theatre Group in Surrey UK and even worked as a stage hand with Wimbledon Theatre in South West London, UK, where of in another era, I met Ralph Reader who wrote the songs for Bud Flanagan and the Crazy Gang.

Nowadays, I still carry on “covering” the Tipperary Drama Festival in Holycross for the “Tipperary Star”. Holycross Drama Festival once hosted my comedy, “Three to Tango”, as did a number of Macra na Feirme groups in Tipperary.
Certainly all the world’s a stage and every stage a world of wonder, of laughter and even a few tears.
No sir, no business like show business and no people like show people.
Break a leg, folks! Not literally, though!