Dublin Up for the Festival
I’ve checked the weather forecast and it’s not looking good for the opening weekend of the fiftieth Dublin Theatre Festival, the oldest dedicated theatre festival in Europe and a heck of a shindig that doesn’t overwhelm you with impossible options.
For a start, the city’s fringe festival has been and gone, praise the Lord, so there is no-one pushing fly posters in your face at every second step or suggesting you see a performance of Albanian modern dance acrobats at midnight when you’ve already sat through three plays, Glory Hallelujah.
Actually, that’s not strictly true. Some Australian aerial daredevils are climbing up walls in the docklands tomorrow night, but you’ll have to make a bit of an effort to find them. They are not so much “in yer face” as way over your heads, and that’s fine by me. I hope they stay there.
In the old days, the Irish tourist board used to ferry over a handful of Irish critics and put them up in the Shelbourne Hotel. That delightful destination on St Stephen’s Green is now modernised and overrun with parties of package tourists. But in the early 1970s, it still had a creaky old world charm – and creaky old style beds.
Each bed had a little machine by its head called a massage boy. You put in a small coin and you would be gently rocked to the land of nod by an extremely comforting vibration. One morning, the late Jack Tinker jumped on a table at breakfast and declared, “I had five massage boys last night!” You can imagine the scenes of wonder and dismay over the kedgeree and kippers.
Another feature of the festival in those days was a morning press conference after the previous night’s premiere. David Nolan had lately been installed as the critic on the Irish Times and had delivered himself of a savage attack on a play about James Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle.
The irate lady playwright crossed the floor and and poured a pint of light ale over the fearless scribe’s head. Without missing a beat, Nolan countered with, “I’ll be after reminding the great writer that I’m a Guinness man myself.” And all before lunchtime…what larks!
Which reminds me, I must remember to pack my umbrella — for use inside and out.