The Journeyman by Eamon Kelly Marino 240pp, £16.99.
This book tells the story of the second half of a life well lived. In the first volume of his memoirs, The Apprentice, Eamon Kelly took us, memorably, through his childhood and youth in Kerry long ago. This time we begin during the Emergency, that curious cut-off time in Ireland when the rest of the world was engaged in the second World War. The young Edmund Kelly (Eamon was to come later, as a result of a garbling of the Irish and English versions of his name) is at the College of Art in Dublin, on a course as a trainee woodworker. He is fortunate in having a teacher with a well-stocked mind, who as well as guiding his charges towards their craft, also encourages them to books and plays and films. And, though he has left school at fourteen, our hero has all the rich tradition of his native place at his finger tips.
After he qualified, he worked for a time as an itinerant woodwork teacher in Kerry. It was a time of shortages and little enough money, but life, as seen by the author, was easy-going and forever brightened by pawky humour. (There are too many good stories to quote, but I can't resist the tale of a guard sent on a murder enquiry to Kerry, where he is meeting the usual tight-lipped response from the local community. Seeing a man working near the shore one day, he points to the sea and asks: "What islands are they?" "God, I don't know," the fellow says, gazing in astonishment, "they weren`t there at all this morning!")
Next came a posting to Listowel where, says Eamon, a year spent is as good as three at university. Not surprisingly, it introduced him to the theatre, under the aegis of Bryan MacMahon and the Listowel Drama Group, but he was thirty-five before he got to play Synge's Playboy, with his wife-to-be, Maura O'Sullivan, as Pegeen Mike. On the strength of their performances, the pair were asked to audition for the Radio Eireann Players and so came to live in Dublin.
The Rep., as it was known, occupied at the time a place in the public affections equalled today only by the various soap opera companies. People gathered round the radio set for the weekly plays and the actors were well-known, if never seen. But as well as drama they had other duties, reading short stories, linking programmes and reading scripts for the likes of gardening and sports programmes. One of these was Take the Floor, that bizarre celii show, which was probably the only programme ever to feature dancing on radio. Here Eamon Kelly established himself as a resident storyteller to such effect that he soon had a programme of his own, The Rambling House. It was Michael MacLiammoir, I think, who claimed that there was no such thing as an Irish theatre, only Anglo-Irish theatre. One knows what he meant, but he was wrong. There was the tradition of storytelling, a theatre of the hearth with tales as old as those of the Greeks and all the elements of drama except, perhaps, dialogue,
It is Eamon Kelly's unique achievement to have brought this tradition on to the stage and united it with the mainstream of theatre. He brings to it all the baggage of his country youth, as well as all the scores and scores of stories which people have sent him from all over Ireland. But, as well as this, he has scripted these tales, shaping them for the stage, sharpening their wit and giving them dramatic valleys and peaks.
Of course, there were also many other highlights to this wonderful career. Hilton Edwards cast him in Brian Friel's Philadelphia Here I Come! which became the first major post-war Broadway hit of the Irish theatre, and subsequently brought our hero on tour all over America, a place apparently well stocked with Kerrymen. Back home, he joined the Abbey company and began a string of much loved performances, including The Tailor and Anstey, and his series of unforgettable storytelling shows. To these he brought, as he himself says of the Tailor, "much of the music and rhythm of Irish to the English he had learned".
At this point I can claim a modest place at the feet of the master, having adapted Seamus Murphy's book, Stone Mad, for Kelly and the stage. "Adapted" is probably too strong a word, for all I did was make a selection, which was further refined by Eamon and the director, Sean McCarthy. Still, it was I who thought of doing it in the first place and I remember it with happiness when many more highly-trumpeted shows have vanished into the enveloping mists of absent-mindedness. There was an inspired set by Bronwyn Cassin, a stone-yard through which the audience used wander after the show, picking up the various implements, there were the warm, wise and funny stories set down by Seamus Murphy, and above all there was Eamon, holding the audience in the palm of his hand while at the same time, each night, expertly carving part of the tombstone of one Walter Poplin - the late husband of Big Maggie of John B. Keane's play.
There were, too, parts in John B. Keane, Synge and George Fitzmaurice, Chekhov and Hugh Leonard, more visits across the Atlantic and the Abbey's tour to Russia in 1988, a dramatic occasion on and off stage, though there are no tales out of school here. But why continue? Better still to get this lovely book. In his eloquent speech, at the recent tribute evening in the Abbey, Michael Colgan pointed out that, as well as Eamon Kelly's qualities as an actor and seanachai, we should now also recognise his significance as a writer. Here is the proof of it. I can pitch it no higher than to say that the Second Book of Eamon is as good as meeting the man himself.