Dangerous roles in different kinds of drama

Displaced in Mullingar: Great days they were not. Michael Harding tries to put an old acquaintance right about the past - personal and political

I was on the street in Mullingar, where I'm usually safe, minding my own business and crossing the zebra crossing near the Just Books bookshop, where I had bought a volume of American short stories. I was thinking about how reading Proust changed Virginia Woolf's life, and I was wondering whether maybe I should sit down this spring and read Proust. Or is it too late at my age? That's when I was ambushed.

A car stopped and a man with a long, thin, grey face hidden by a baseball cap stuck his neck out the window and roared at me.

"Young fella! Do ye not know your friends?"

Nobody calls me young at my age, and the term is a chilling echo of deeply unpleasant moments in secondary school.

When he parked up, he reminded me that we were at school together, and though I wasn't entirely easy in his company I decided to play along for a quiet life.

We went for coffee.

"Ah," he said. "Those were great days."

"No," I said. "They were not. As I recall it, we were all disturbed, and isolated in our own little sad existence, terrified to death by unexplained puberty."

He didn't know what I was talking about.

I said: "Everyone was at it. The football team. The lads in the bicycle shed. The honours maths brigade. The school was one great orchestra of groaning boys, panting their way up and down the slopes of fantasy to one climax after another, like a mighty, sweaty horde of breathless cyclists in the Tour de France."

He was grinning as if he was measuring me for a coffin. And the coffee was mediocre.

"Are you still at the play writing?" he inquired.

That's a trick question. Should I reply, "Yes, and isn't it sad that I still haven't realised I'm no good at it"? Or should I say, "No, I'm not still at it, I gave it up when the psychiatrist put me on the tablets"? I didn't answer him. Instead, I decided to bite back.

"I see you have a 'Tiocfaidh ár lá' sticker on the back window of your car. Are you still with the boys?"

He bowed his head. Evidently he was man of patience, a lion who endures the bites of many flies. His eyes scanned the room as he whispered: "It was a war, Michael. It was a war. We were part of history. That's all."

He sounded like Clint Eastwood.

"War my backside," I said.

There was a long pause. Then he tried to change the subject.

"Do you know," he said. "I was only in a theatre twice in me life. Would you believe that?" He meant it. He was proud of the boast.

"Yes," I said. "I believe you."

I've never been out of theatre. Not since I won best actor in a one-act drama festival in Cavan, playing a part written by Gene Finnegan, a young Cavan writer. I remember him and me one night in Kiltubrid in Co Leitrim, pushing an Austin 1100 down the hill from the Mountain Tavern at three in the morning to get it started, and then watching it slide across the ice into the far ditch.

My biggest role was a character called Danger Mullally. It wasn't exactly James Bond, but Danger was as close to a cool role as I ever got. I knew I was winning when we were at a party one night after a festival in Dundalk and a married woman whom I didn't know kissed me in the hallway of her bungalow. Her husband was in the kitchen, and it was a big kiss; a real kiss.

And as someone said to me on the road home: "He was in more than the kitchen. He was in Long Kesh for five years."

"It wasn't my fault," I said. "She started it."

"Well," he said, "you've been warned. Play-acting is a risky business. Especially if you're offstage."

Whatever about risks taken offstage, in lonely bungalows in the middle of the night, there were far more wonderful risks taken onstage. Local drama groups were not afraid to tackle plays such as Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or The Balcony by Jean Genet.

I remember one prophetic piece called Duff's Disciples, produced by Ballintra Players, about where we would end up, if we kept listening to grey-faced men in baseball caps and balaclavas who never bothered going to theatre because they were too busy writing history with the neighbours' blood.