I Never Had a Proper Job by Barry Cassin

Author:Barry Cassin [Cassin, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781909718685
Google: LaAHBAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 14568102
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2012-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

I had never thought of 37 as a highroad to international fame and fortune. I had hoped to establish a company that would play in Dublin and on tour. That dream was now shattered. I was back in the pack, sunk without a trace. When Gerard Healy offered me a job as stage manager with a company that would play in London, I accepted. I had no wish to be a stage manager but I saw little chance of regular work with the established Dublin companies. The Edwards/Mac Liammóir company and Longford Productions were veritable closed shops, and acceptance into the Abbey company required fluency in Irish, which I had not. So it was goodbye Dublin. Goodbye Ireland. Hail emigration to join the ambitious and the dispossessed who had gone before.

The company I joined was an offshoot of the Players’ Theatre, which some years previously had a brief career commencing with The Black Stranger by Gerard Healy, commissioned for the Famine commemoration of 1947. It ran in the Gate with Liam Redmond outstanding as the father, symbol of a stricken nation’s endurance and tenacity. A season followed in the Olympia, with plays by Redmond and Seamus de Faoite, whose play touched on incest, a daring theme for the time. The season failed and no more was heard of a company that had promised much.

Some years later, Healy, Redmond and Helen O’Malley – founder members of the Players’ Theatre – joined forces again to present O’Casey and Synge in the Lindsey Theatre, Notting Hill Gate. The season was a triumph for Redmond, his performances as Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, Fluther in The Plough and the Stars, and Martin Doul in The Well of the Saints winning the highest praise from the London critics.

Throughout the season I was dissatisfied. Stage management was not acting, was not directing. When the season ended I hung on in Notting Hill Gate in the hope of finding work, until a shortage of money forced me to move to a flat near Latimer Road tube station. The address was Blechynden Street, a name as unenticing as the rooms I occupied on the top floor. On street level was a laundry where female Irish voices threatened violence if the missing bag-wash did not fucking turn up tomorrow, and male Irish voices disturbed the early-to-bed English with late-night chorusing of I’ll take you home again, Kathleen. And kept me awake counting, for the hundredth time, the chimneypots outlined against an alien sky and listening to passing tube trains that led to nowhere I wanted to go.

I occupied two rooms, a bedroom on one side of the upstairs landing, a living room on the other. On the landing stood a gas stove and a pockmarked sink. Good enough for one who must live skinny and endure the cold deep into November when frost drove me to order coal, and count out a daily allowance lump by lump.

It was not that I did not look for work. I wrote to every possible source.

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