Michael Harding: Life takes me from a play for love to a more solitary stage

Sometimes I enjoy being alone, which I am at the moment as I go around the country to various venues giving readings from my memoirs. I have time to notice things such as blackbirds, and red squirrels chasing each other under the trees.

Of course I’d also like to be in Poland, walking along the streets of Warsaw with my Beloved, arm in arm, but I’m not. So I must be content with my own company for a while, listening to Chopin as I drive, singing love songs in the bath and sipping malt whiskey by the fire, with not even the General to keep me company. He fell in love with a Citroën C3 and is reportedly in France.

I am alone, either in hotel rooms or at my fireside, and it’s like an amputation, but I must grow new limbs in the shadowlands of melancholy.

A friend phoned me.

“I hear you’re on the road; why not come to dinner? I can pick you up when you’re in Galway.”

He’s a chef, so I had no worries about the food, but he drinks like a fish. When I arrived he served whiskey in crystal glasses. He was already sweating, and his wife, a fragile lady with a shawl around her shoulders, was as animated as a lampshade. I’m sure she disapproves of her husband’s drinking. And their two daughters moved through the house as if their father didn’t exist.

Food for thought

The main course was a slice of steak the size of a fish finger, with some red goo scrawled on the enormous plate like Chinese calligraphy. There was no sign of a kitchen and no smell of cooking. He just disappeared through a door and came back with the plates. When I wanted to go to the toilet, I spoke politely, in deference to the woman.

I said, “Where’s the bathroom?”

Although I think “restroom” would have been the better term, since I was simply going to get a rest from his alcoholic blustering and his wife’s withering disapproval.

The following morning he drove me back into the city. He wanted to pick up milk from Spar, he said. As he passed a gate on his laneway, he spoke.

“That’s Tommy’s gate.”

“Who’s Tommy?” I wondered.

“Tommy is the man I was talking about last night,” he said.

Clearly I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the conversation. Apparently he was involved in a legal dispute with his neighbour over a right of way, and that brought us to the subject of the Gaiety Theatre.

“Will this be your first time in a play by JB Keane?” he asked.

"No," I said. "In the mid-1970s I played Danger Mullally in Many Young Men of Twenty."

“Was that in the Gaiety or the Abbey?” he wondered.

“Actually it was in the Ballroom of Romance in Glenfarne,” I said. I was a teacher looking for love and the local drama society was my only option. The group was established by the parish priest, a wonderfully exuberant man who animated communities everywhere he went by fostering amateur drama. He had a large, boyish face and gripped a pipe between his teeth all day long, whether it was lit or not.

He invited me to the parochial house one day. Silver trophies from drama festivals lined the shelves of his study, and a coal fire blazed in the hearth even though it was only 3pm.

A model of the set for the play, which he made himself from balsa wood, sat on a side table. An elderly housekeeper wheeled in a trolley of tea and scones, which we devoured. Then he lit his pipe and announced that he wanted me to play Danger Mullally.

“He’s a kind of a roguish character,” the priest said, without a hint of irony. “It would suit you down to the ground.”

And those drama groups did animate country life; there was lots of fun and courtship in the dark wings, and robust ballads sung late into the night in the pubs after rehearsals, and kisses robbed or offered in the wonderfully ambiguous zone between real life and illusion that people create when they step into a theatre.

Back then the stage was a way of never being alone. And yet now, as I drive from town to town, and wait in various dressing rooms, and listen to the buzz in the foyer as the audience gathers, I realise that standing on a stage can sometimes be the most solitary place in the world.