'I felt like a thespian god as I lay among the perfumes'

FESTIVAL DIARY: A whirlwind of performances during the West Cork Fit Up festival

LAST WEEK I took my one-man-show, The Tinker's Curse, to the West Cork Fit Up Festival, and played in three villages and on two islands.

My director, a rugged individual with a passion for clams, drove a terminally ill Renault 19. The lighting designer, a tall young man who reads philosophy books, and the stage manager, a woman whose son got eight Bs in his Leaving Cert, squashed into the rear seat and we headed off on the trail of Anew McMaster and other thespians who, in olden days, swept through the villages of West Cork, mesmerising the locals with wonderful dramas.

We stayed in a small hotel on the edge of the sea. The diningroom smelled of carpet. The tables in the foyer smelled of detergent, applied each morning to banish the beer stains of the previous night.

The first place we “fitted up” was a GAA hall in Kealkill. We masked the windows with cardboard, rolled out a green gymnastic mat on the floor to mark a playing area, rigged three spotlights on a pole, and waited for 40 people to straggle in from the soft sea mist outside.

Afterwards, we drank pints in a pub crammed with Leaving Cert students: girls in party gear and boys under a canopy in the back, smoking, discussing tactics and spilling the occasional glass of Guinness in awkward excitement.

The following morning I was exhausted. I told the others I wanted to walk into the market in Bantry before we started for Ballydehob; I needed Nurofen.

In the market square I met Ricardo Basaratti, an old man with a London accent, who was in Egypt in 1948 with the British Army, and made friends with a Jewish family who later helped him get into the jewellery trade.

He was selling jewellery in Bantry from a box on the street, and he had a big stone on a gold ring that was a perfect match for my little finger.

“I lost my wife 25 years ago,” he said. “I come from Cobh to Bantry on the bus to sell rings on the street; it gets me out of the house.” Wolfe Tone watched us from his plinth in the middle of the square, where he holds a telescope behind his back, and pushes his chest out. All around him the market was buzzing with fishmongers and fortune-tellers, and the stalls glistened with fresh fish, juicy olives and cheese as strong as old socks.

If the sculpture of Wolfe Tone is accurate, the father of Irish Republicanism had the delicate, slim body of a good ballet dancer.

Another famous Irishman is celebrated on a plinth in Ballydehob; Dan O’Mahony was the 1935 Wrestling Champion of the World and, if the sculpture of his body in Ballydehob is accurate, there was nothing delicate about him; his image, cast in bronze, is a fearsome sight, naked, but for short pants and wrestling boots.

Even after Nurofen, I still felt extremely delicate as I lay in the Community Hall all afternoon, waiting for the evening performance. I dozed in a storeroom, on a gym mattress, with a sheet and two rugs and three cushions. The cushions reeked of feminine perfumes, and I felt again like a thespian god as I lay there among the perfumes, eating fig rolls and bananas to restore my energy.

The audience arrived and paid, and the play began, and when it was over everyone clapped and went away. I packed my costume and props in a suitcase, while the director and the young philosopher dismantled the lights, and undid all the blackened windows, and swept the floor.

The lights were turned off. The hall was closed up. I got into the old Renault and tucked into a plate of bacon and cabbage, which had been wrapped in tinfoil earlier in the day, because my stomach had been too delicate to cope with food.

I sat there eating and enjoying random conversations with people on the street. An American couple confessed that their house was haunted. A retired Garda reminisced about the night he saw a Traveller woman give birth in a tent on the roadside. And a woman with tan, athletic limbs who sails around the world told me she believes it’s unlucky to mention “the rabbit in the moon” when she is sailing her yacht. I said I didn’t even know there was a rabbit in the moon.

Then we bid farewell to Ballydehob and squashed into the old Renault, like four clowns, with lights and costumes and fuse boards and headed on for the Beara Peninsula, Cape Clear and Killcrohane.

Next week Don Wycherley and his crew will do it all again, with another wonderful play.