A Night at the Opera

The Soprano was screeching her way to the ear splitting higher notes in Lucia De Lammermoor by Donizetti the night I was born. There had been thunder and lightning earlier in the day but the fireworks lit by Casey Whelans Grand-da went off into a frosty starlit sky. 

Thomasina was peppering, pacing the halls  in Dr Haddens Nursing Home awaiting the imminent arrival of his first baby -  he had been reduced to putting a sign on the 4^th floor window  -  “No Stir Yet” to spare his, and the querants legs.   The other opera was Much ado about Nothing which Siobhan would have been at pains to refute as she panted her way to my heads arrival on the planet.

 “It’s not so much fun now, is it” enquired the spinster midwife with grim delight as she soaped her elbows and grasped me by the shoulders.

 I opened my tiny mouth and screamed an impromptu duet with the singer.

Picking my way gingerly through the trail of scutter down Gibsons lane, I paused  long enough at fat Angie Molloys  to register the Rose of Castille poster marking  the 25^th Anniversary on the door. Her Persian cat Chan was sitting in the window on a box of black magic licking its balls. It was killing day in the Abbatoir and our new neighbour was aghast.

 “Jesus,I never even knew it was there” she protested to my Mother  in her soft Donegal accent as she led her son from the kitchen in disgrace, a tea towel held to his bleeding mouth. In the excitement of getting coke he had taken a lump out of the glass.

 Murray Dickie the tenor had married Maureen Springer the singer, and they had called their son John. Only in Ireland would people named Spring call their son Dick. 

I was heading to the opera rehearsals with the choir run by Sr Mary Walsh, where every child in the town who could walk and string a sentence together, had turned up for the auditions in a dilapidated town hall and sung Sandy and Andy until she had rested her white knuckles on the piano and entreated us to sing something, anything else. Even a hymn will do she implored and so I bursted into a falsetto rendition of His peace he gives to us. I secured my place and went to stand at the side of the wall with the other lucky children.  One of the first boys I got talking to was Michael Londra with a side parting,  who unfastened and re-belted his Navy Trenchcoat a thousand times with the fright. 

I hear an unconfirmed whisper that he is singing still.

 Apart from changing a tyre on Derek O Gara’s bicycle and giving Rory Carberry the bambis , I was learning how to behave in the Theatre Royal, as a million overalled men smoking roll ups, carried scenery and props around the warrens backstage, and held up signs saying Quiet Please at every and all opportunity or gesticulated wildly at the posters of the man with his finger on his lips. I still have the backstage pass signed by Andrew Potter.  Years later a man I knew vaguely would get the contract to clean the entire theatre, but being already up to his swiss roll in another venue asked me to go in and flick around the dressing rooms with a duster. He gave me a dustpan and brush and told me to start at the top of the nosebleed section and work down, chair by chair.

 I waited till the fire door slammed behind him and legged it.

The first time I sang in the singing pubs was nerve wracking.  So was the last.

 Preparations were conducted under an absolute veil of secrecy not seen since the days of the Enigma Machine. 

No-one would tell anyone who was singing, what they were singing, or even if they were singing at all.

We might not even enter sighed the barman as he stacked glasses and stared out at the Bullring. 

He had a scorp on him as he had been serving at a lock-in rehearsal the night before till 3am. 

There was rumour and counter rumour and propaganda and misinformation on an epic scale.

 I sang for everywhere, without a whit of allegiance, and so crooned Loving You by Mary Black in the Commodore Lounge, practicing with Ger Lacey in the damp basement with the pool table, where one went for a clandestine coort.   I sang Peggy Gordon in one pub -  and Anachie Gordon in another, the former about an alcoholic complaining about a woman who is ignoring him and the latter about a girl who’s Da won’t let her marry her boyfriend and so she dies of a broken heart on her wedding night to an old man.  And then sure  doesn’t your man come back from the sea and collapse and die beside her.

 It had about 87 verses which I condensed into about 16. 

Once I rehearsed and sang for 2 separate premises on the same night, without detection.

 I sang ballads in Tims and the Menapia, showstoppers in the Goal Bar,  the blues in  Mackens,  Come all Ye’s in Wavecrest and tunes in the Tower. I lilted in The Big Wash,  whistled jazz in the Talbot and dressed in floor length velvet with a cigarette holder, belted out Peggy Lees’s Fever in Speakers with a jazz band playing high hat and bass.

 I watched Marty Frayne forget the words half way through the first verse and nearly faint with the fright until I led the crowd in with the chorus. The 12 or 14 pints he had consumed for Dutch courage  may have contributed to his downfall. We sat up all night in a fever of excitement, expectation and alcoholic poisoning waiting for the adjudicator to post the results. We bet each other out of the way to see who was first, in both singing and swinging. 

Ah sure that aul swinging thing has torn the arse out of it the purists would cry. The irony of the winner one year was that it was infamous as a pub where there was no singing allowed at all under pain of death all the rest of the year. If you opened your mouth for a big yawn you would get your first verbal warning, after the second you were flung out on the path.  

Last week I went back to the Theatre Royal to see Therese and La Navarisse and nodded and smiled at all my Friary buddies in their best bib and tucker selling programmes for twenty bucks. Even the nun I had breasted and given down the banks about her parking grasped my hand warmly and told me how much she missed my smile on the gates.

 Not enough to slip me a programme it would appear. 

I sat in the beautiful building and admired the tiered seating, remembering the many times I had sit here with my Mother, she, being the first one to take me to an opera as a small child. At the height of the final chorus I  had turned around and shouted up into her startled face, - “it’s BEDLAM eh?”

Now I let the sound wash over me, until my bladder demands attention. Name of Goddle mighty how are all these old English people able to scourge wine and then sit for an hour without making a bee line for the jacks  -  I thought as I crossed and re-crossed my legs.

 In an agony of frustration I tried to remember where the conveniences were.  

Convenient they ain’t. 

 It would have been quicker to go home. I excused myself from the row and made good my escape. The tuxedo’d attendant stares  at me in disbelief as I mime a jig. I ran the equivalent of High street to Bride street and back in one minute flat. He won’t let me back in. I am relegated to a seat upstairs with the backstage crew watching proceedings on a monitor and sighing dramatically about my companion who will surely assume that I am after taking a turn on the toilet.  

Don’t come out, don’t come out, don’t come out, bring the handbags at least, I thought feverishly.

Over half a century, my life has been inextricably linked with a Theatre, and a festival, (believing as a small child that the fireworks were for MY  birthday party)  one I have participated in, both in the wings, and on the fringe, and now reside  behind the actual Theatre, where I can see the coloured floodlights beaming into the night sky, highlighting the music and the memories, and  lighting up the smiling faces of the ghosts of long ago.