ARTSCAPE: NATURALLY THERE were plenty of good theatrical stories told with much gusto at the Gate's 80th birthday/ Michael Colgan's 25th anniversary celebrations this week. And a few more stories were generated as the evening progressed, writes Deirdre Falvey
NATURALLY THERE were plenty of good theatrical stories told with much gusto at the Gate's 80th birthday/ Michael Colgan's 25th anniversary celebrations this week. And a few more stories were generated as the evening progressed. The star-studded performance at the theatre spanned a range of work produced by Colgan over the past quarter century, a whistle-stop burst of two minutes for each piece. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall with all those egos in the dressing rooms, or in the negotiations for the running order. Afterwards about 180 guests, including the actors, playwrights such as Brian Friel, Conor McPherson and Bernard Farrell, and a smattering of Gate supporters (including Denis Desmond, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Fingleton, Susan and Ciaran McNamara) moved across the road to the Gresham for dinner, preceded by an open-mic session hosted by Risteard Cooper.
Cooper congratulated Colgan on his 80th birthday, marvelling how he manages to look so young, and, wedding-like, read congratulatory messages, real (Tom Stoppard) and imagined (Pat Kenny, on how he always loved the Gaiety!), and unclear whether they were real or imagined (Garry Hynes). He also read a warm and sincere message from Friel - who was sitting at Colgan's table - praising his relentless persuasion. Pinter's message included one pause and two beats. Ralph Fiennes wrote how being at the Gate was "a defining moment of my life".
There was a touch of the "you're wonderful Michael, nearly as wonderful as me" about the evening, but overall it was an amusing and feel-good reflection on the Gate and Colgan's larger-than-life role. For some reason hotels featured strongly in a number of anecdotes - as Alan Stanford said, "Michael and hotels have one of the worst relationships I know". Actor Stephen Brennan added hotel tales to the pot, and playwright Bernard Farrell described high jinks at the Berlin Theatre Festival 25 years ago, with Colgan teasing the hotel staff with ever earlier wake-up calls.
Bill Golding told a funny story about Micheál MacLiammóir's disdain for Golding's advertising voiceovers, and how MacLiammóir was then offered a voiceover - for Mum, "which, I understand, is some class of deodorant". (He declined.) He said how chuffed he and Hilton Edwards would be - "they'd be loving this".
Conor McPherson talked about working at the Gate as playwright and director, and Colgan's perceptive contribution, including a tale about how he persuaded him and Neil Jordan to provide one-act plays to run along with a short Friel, and how Colgan's small input raised the single laugh in Jordan's poetic and reflective piece right at the start, leaving the audience expecting more humour.
Alan Stanford was amusing about his long-time colleague ("people must suspect we've been sleeping together too long"), who was a "persistent, relentless and determined" producer, but he recalled his greater talent was as a stage manager, rescuing crises in the middle of performances by, for example, rushing to the Rotunda to grab a wheelchair from a woman in labour when the one on stage malfunctioned mid-performance.
Of course it wouldn't be a theatre night without a bit of unexpected cabaret. Jeananne Crowley took the mic while Gate chairman Laurence Crowley was speaking and declared that Michael should have his own theme song, "Oh lord it's so hard to be humble, when I'm perfect in every way", and proceeded later to start singing her amusing, if slightly embarrassing, version. Later, when Colgan took the mic, he commented, "Jeananne, the older you get the more you remind me of Anne Madden" - a reference to an interlude earlier this year when Madden heckled Colgan at the fancy launch of the Godot tour, accusing him of nabbing all the glory for the genesis of the original production.
But that seemed water off a duck's back for the master of stage management, a man who declared he was born happy and lucky, and whose people skills and persuasive powers were in evidence all around.
• A rare staging of Ralph Vaughan Williams's opera of JM Synge's Riders to Seaat London's Coliseum got a great reception, though not without some tragedy, as it was preceded by the death of the man whose project it was, conductor Richard Hickox. The 40-minute 1932 opera was described by the Guardian as "a sure-handed debut as opera director from the actor Fiona Shaw", who set it up with Sibelius's Luonnotaras prologue, with mesmerising film sequences by Dorothy Cross.
Patricia Bardon sings Maurya's cathartic final monologue beautifully, says the Guardian,and invests Maurya with fierce dignity.
The London Independentdescribes it as "Vaughan Williams's finest moment, a lamentation of extraordinary beauty which Bardon sings as if finally released from her grief and somehow reborn. Fishing boats descend from above like coffins for each of her dead men." It concludes: "Quietly devastating."
• Ah, how things change in just a few months. Bertie's latest incarnation is in panto in the Gaiety's Cinderella, where he stutters and avoids trips to the castle, and his daughter Cinderella is writing a romantic novel in between slaving for the ugly sisters, in a great performance from Donagh Deeney. It underlines what a pantomime Bertie's tribunal performance became.