THE LAST STRAW - FRANK McNALLY: I went to the ballet last weekend, for the first time in my life. It was Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky's great masterpiece of love, death, and feathers; and like millions before me, I was almost transported by its beauty. Almost, but not quite; because every time I got swept away, I got swept violently back by the sound of the audience coughing.
I don't know what it is about large auditoriums that causes respiratory problems. I used to blame religion, on the grounds that, at Mass, the congregation always coughed constantly. My theory was that, reminded of the transience of earthly life, people became suddenly convinced that they had serious chest infections. Either that or during the long silences left by the priest, they needed to check if they were still in this world. It must be the same terrible impulse that makes you want to laugh during a funeral, I thought.
But the Point Theatre last weekend was like the consumption ward of a 19th-century hospital (in a town with a coalmine).
The sounds ranged from little strangulated coughs, where the audience member was clearly having a fit and making heroic efforts to control it, to great big honking noises that suggested a walrus having pups. Other coughs were precise and calculated, the kind you make when you arrive home and find the babysitter and her boyfriend on the sofa, and they obviously haven't heard you enter.
Even so, I tried to ignore them, and this was almost possible when events on stage were lively. For several moments in Act One, I was fully absorbed by the action, in which Prince Siegfried celebrates his birthday with friends and the court jester. The queen arrives with his present - a crossbow - and an ultimatum to get married. Darkness falls. The guests disperse, leaving the prince alone and confused until, in the distance, he sees a flock of swans.
Meanwhile, also in the distance, a flock of crows is heard. No - in fact, it's the bloody audience coughing again; transforming the theatre into a scene from the morning after a smokers' convention.
But there is renewed hope in the second half of Act One, as the swans - imprisoned by the evil genius, Rothbart - descend from the night sky, and Siegfried drops his defences (including the crossbow) and falls in love with their queen, Odette. This is one of the great passages in ballet. And by the end of it, I myself was almost soaring, swan-like, above the lake. But then the coughing started up again and I hit the water like a shot duck.
Not knowing much about ballet, I can't say whether this was a classic production. During the interval, I overheard a woman - who was clearly an expert (in both ballet and voice projection) - complaining of a dancer that "her upper body is beautiful, but her legs are all over the place". I didn't have the courage to say it at the time, but if that woman is reading this, I'd like to point out that that's exactly what people say about real swans. So there.
During the interval I also got to read the programme notes, which claimed that as a young man, Tchaikovsky was so desperate to escape his marriage that he once "attempted to contract a fatal case of pneumonia by standing for several hours in the frigid Moscow River".
This is the sort of detail that, were it part of a ballet's storyline, would lead you to suspect the composer was on drugs. But it also made me wonder if the people who stood outside during the interval, smoking in the frigid Dublin air, were hoping to catch something serious, thereby avoiding the second half of a show that their partners had dragged them to, screaming.
Whatever the cause, the coughing reached such a peak in Act Two that I wanted to grab Siegfried's crossbow and use it on the next member of the audience who as much as attempted a throat clearance. But instead, I just gritted my teeth and tried to focus on the stage: where the fickle prince was betraying Odette with the evil temptress, Odile; repenting his mistake too late, and thereby setting up the great death scene for which this ballet is famous.
A scene which, unfortunately, didn't happen. Sad ballet endings were banned in Russia under the communists, who didn't want them depressing the masses. This was obviously a Soviet-era version of Swan Lake, so the prince - like Stalin's five-year plans - achieved all targets (the girl, happiness, etc), thereby foreshadowing the inevitable triumph of socialism.
If there was no death scene on stage, however, the coughers in the audience made up for it. Lingering bravely to the end, they applauded the performance between gasps. After which they limped out into the pre-Christmas night, less like swans than turkeys.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie