It's a spiritual moment in the Olympia Theatre. Rosaleen Linehan and Des Keogh, holding white candles, sing Alleyloouiaa, alleeylooiiia. There's great feeling there. The audience is moved deeply. The two comic performers sing of "long, long, long, long ago" when we were "a blessed isle of Roman collars". "They are side-splittingly funny," says Gerard Skelly, an English, French and Latin teacher in Sandford Park school. As an adolescent in boarding school, late on Sunday nights under the blankets (this is not a story about hormones!), he remembers listening to the radio to hear their show. "You could hear the giggles all around the dormitory," he says. His friend, Waterford man Billy O'Keeffe, who works in the travel industry, is another lover of social/political satire. The Des & Rosie Ride Again show casts a cool eye on the New Ireland.
Before the performance, friends and family meet for a small celebration in Kelly's Bar to mark both the sale of 25,000 tickets since the show opened in the HQ Hall of Fame at the start of the year, and the show's opening at the Olympia this week. Fergus Linehan, the show's writer and husband of Rosaleen, and formerly arts editor of this newspaper, is delighted with its success. "We didn't know how it would work, it's 15 years since we did a revue." One of the couple's sons, Fergus Linehan, director of the Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival, is here and one of the lesser-known Linehans, his sister Evanna Linehan, a primary-school teacher, has come along with her two friends, banker Ann Dundon and chiropodist Andrea Muldowney. Evanna was never bitten by the acting bug. "They did their best but I've too much sense," she says. The audience is out in force tonight, many remembering the original Des and Rosie revues. The fans say that anyone who misses Scrap Saturday or even Father Ted, for instance, should get themselves to the Olympia for a series of wicked laughs.