A funny thing happened at the Olympia on Saturday

She bumped into me at the interval in the bar. ‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked, as if we had just left a hotel bedroom together

I WAS STANDING outside the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on Saturday afternoon, queuing to see The Night Joe Dolan's Car Broke Down, when the woman beside me declared that she was foundered with the cold. Then she fingered a packet of Silvermints in her handbag and offered me one. I declined. She said the mints might keep us warm. The use of the plural alarmed me, as she didn't have a companion in tow, and, besides, her body carried enough fat to keep both of us warm in an unheated igloo.

“A lot of people going to this show are from the country,” she explained, as if she knew everyone in the milling crowd by the door. I looked around and concluded that she was right.

“There’s something about country folk that sticks out when they are in a city,” she said.  “They’re more friendly, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, wishing the usher with the dickie bow would soon let us in.

“Did you know,” she said, “that in China, when country people were visiting the city long ago, they’d rent a house and use it as shelter for their donkeys and cattle while they camped in the yard outside, in tents?”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I seen a photograph of it,” she said. “I just had lunch with my friend – she’s a teacher – in a swanky art gallery up the road, and there was an exhibition of photographs taken in China, and me boy was on the wall.”

“Who?”

“The donkey. And the woman beside him.”

Inside, the audience was jovial, and they laughed through most of the first half. I was in the stalls. The woman with the Silvermints was on the balcony. But she bumped into me at the interval in the bar.

“Did you enjoy that?” she asked, as if we had just left a hotel bedroom together.

I said, “I enjoyed the Horse.”

The Horse was the main character, a delusional Cavan man trapped in a public house for decades until Joe Dolan comes down from heaven one night to brighten up his life for half an hour.

I said, “It was a powerful performance.”

“That was Conor Sheridan,” she said. “In real life he’s a vet in Bailieborough.” Then she threatened to show me the knickers in her handbag, which she intended to throw at Joe Dolan. The fact that an actor was playing Joe Dolan didn’t bother her. For her, it was the real thing.

She said, “It’s my fifth time to see the show, and last time there was a big important politician hanging around afterwards, praising the cast, and he had the most amazing wig. I mean it was a beautiful wig. I envied him. A kind of work of art. The only trouble was that the poor man didn’t match the wig. The wig and the man were living in totally different worlds. Do you know what I mean?”

During the second half of the play, Joe Dolan entered and sang five songs, and the lady with the mints threw the knickers, which landed on the stage, and Joe took them in his hand and cherished them for a moment before putting them away in his trouser pocket.

Conor Sheridan continued to play the crazy Cavan man with elaborate physicality. His exaggerated way of drawing each word from the pit of his stomach seemed more akin to the feral energy of a Shakespearean actor than to the restrained irony that usually drips like cold treacle off some Dublin stages. And though the play was horrid simple, as they say in Cavan, it wasn’t a million miles away from plays by JB Keane that were kept alive for decades by amateur drama groups.

On my way home I stopped to get milk in a SuperValu that was still open. A girl in uniform was sorting Solas bulbs on a shelf. The cashier was frail and wizened, and she noted the Rubex in my basket and said, “That’s what you want these days: plenty of vitamin C.”

I said, “It’s quiet tonight,” looking around at the empty aisles. She had a mug of tea beside her. She said, “It’s quiet every night.” And I couldn’t contradict her.

Further on towards Cavan I noticed a lot of pubs were closed, their windows darkened, and the car parks empty. Soon all those lovely crazy Cavan men will be dead and gone, I thought, and the young ones turning grey, in far away Australia.