As the panto season begins, Andy Barclaysalutes a lavish new book devoted to the colourful history of the Gaiety.
"Oh wasn't there the gaiety . . ." Gaiety indeed there was and is at the Grand Old Lady of South King Street, the theatre that showcased three of Ireland's greatest geniuses of the boards - Maureen Potter, Jimmy O'Dea and Micheál MacLiammóir - and which is now celebrated in a sumptuous book right on cue for the Christmas boxes.
The occasion marked is the theatre's comprehensive restoration, funded by owners Denis and Caroline Desmond to the tune of €2.2 million, and €7.8 million from the Government. The stage has been rebuilt, the orchestra pit enlarged, backstage areas expanded back and up, and front-of-house areas given a thorough face-lift.
The job has taken months, a far cry from the construction of the Gaiety in 1871, when the theatre was built in an astonishing 28 weeks at a cost of £26,000. The owners then were brothers John and Michael Gunn.
As Robert O'Byrne writes, the Gunns were "the sons of a Scotsman who had settled in Dublin where he ran a successful business at 61 Grafton Street selling sheet music, harmonicas and pianos until his death in a tram accident in 1861. Ten years later, his two sons applied for, and obtained, a 21-year licence under the terms of a parliamentary act from the reign of George III 'regulating the stage in the City and County of Dublin'. On April 21st 1871, the Letters Patent Office granted the Gunns permission to establish 'a well-regulated theatre and therein at all times publicly to act, represent or perform any interlude, tragedy, comedy, prelude, opera, burletta, play, farce or pantomime . . .' "
And so the Gaiety, as Eugene Watters wrote in Infinite Variety: Dan Lowrey's Music Hall - still the most entertaining book by far on theatre in Dublin - "became the leading Playhouse. Under the vigorous and inspiring management of the Gunns, the finest actors and troupes in Theatreland were attracted to Dublin in season after season of Shakespeare and the Classics, Italian and English Opera, and that hilarious cross between Opera, Leg Show and Pantomime called Opera Bouffe. Here appeared the divine Madame Ristori and Sarah Bernhardt; and it was here that Emily Soldene rode a circus horse onto the stage, in tights, with a succulent display of thigh which had caught the roving eye of the Prince of Wales when he saw her on a poster at a pig show."
It was an Irish "actress", of course, Nellie Clifden - and there's a stage name if ever there was one - who was smuggled into the officers' quarters of the Grenadier Guards on the Curragh in 1861, and into the Prince of Wales's bunk, and she it was who, shall we say, initiated the portly prince into the delights of dalliance.
Big, glossy and gloriously illustrated, this new book gives a blow-by-blow of each decade on the Gaiety's boards. The detail is exhaustive, redolent of many an authorial hour knee-deep in cuttings and files and boxes of ephemera, and if there's a quibble it is that stories and anecdotes of all those years are at a minimum. And O'Byrne is a bit snooty when it comes to that mainstay of South King Street: pantomime: "On a less serious note, pantomime was a staple of Christmas at the Gaiety from a very early date . . ."
They're all here: the D'Oyly Carte operas; the Carl Rosa Opera Company; the Dublin Grand Opera Society; Gaiety Revels with Jimmy O'Dea; Edwards and MacLiammóir; the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society; Brian Friel and the Field Day Company; Eamonn Andrews Productions; Gaels of Laughter with Maureen Potter and Brendan Grace; the Eurovision Song Contest; the John Player Tops. List after list after list.
Page-long panels throughout the book highlight the stars of the shows, from La Bernhardt to U2. Constance Markievicz gets an extraordinary four pages of ritual obeisance, then gets cut down to size: of a performance of hers in 1907 a critic wrote "An artist can be too intense and in earnest sometimes and appear ridiculous to those in front."
A huge delight are the many close-ups of the details of the building: the stucco garlands, the plaster putti, the gilt and gingerbread work that I fell for as a small boy in these high Victorian halls of delight. Many a generation of Dubliners first tasted the joys of theatre at the Gaiety pantomimes, and worshipped the twinkling feet and warm hearts of O'Dea and Potter and their heirs under the benign gaze of those cheery cherubs.
The essence of live performance, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd was summed up with his customary brilliance by Louis MacNeice in Death of an Actress in 1940, on the death of the great music-hall star Florrie Forde:
". . .this one-time chorus girl, whose role
for more than 40 stifling years was giving
sexual, sentimental or comic entertainment,
a gaudy posy for the popular soul.
Plush and cigars: she waddled into the lights,
Old and huge and painted, in velvet and tiara,
Her voice gone but around her head an aura
Of all her vanilla-sweet forgotten vaudeville
nights.
With an elephantine shimmy and a sugared wink,
She threw a trellis of Dorothy Perkins roses
Around an audience come from slum and
suburb
And weary of the tea-leaves in the sink . . ."
Old and huge and freshly-painted, the Grand Old Lady of South King Street is good for another 136 years.
Dublin's Gaiety Theatre by Robert O'Byrne is published by the theatre's owners at €65