bahern7

Certain work done for free is worth every unearned penny, and amateur acting falls into that category. In January last year I had an unexpected email. "Hi Brian," wrote Declan, from whom I hadn't heard in ten years. "I'm doing a play in Portmarnock in May. The director's looking for men in their forties. It's Arsenic and Old Lace. Come along to rehearsals in Malahide if you're interested." I remembered going to see Arsenic and Old Lace in the Gaiety in the mid-1980s with my English teacher. Before you get the wrong idea, I wasn't on a date with Miss O'Driscoll. A whole bunch of the class went along. So here was my chance to act in Joseph Kesselring's 1941 classic and return to treading the amateur boards after a decade-long hiatus. I drove over to Malahide and met everybody. The director, Jean Goslin, was charming and welcoming, with lots of experience putting a variety of acting troupes through their paces. I read for the part...

                                                      Todd Flesk was riding in a taxicab to the museum district of Ole Zork City. Smoking heavily, he was bearing up considering—on top of his own woes—the cabdriver’s plangent whine which filled the car with an air of great miserableness. The problem for the driver was a constant stream of cyclists whizzing to within a whisker of his bonnet before veering off from it as quickly as they’d arrived. Todd sensed the poor fellow had reached a tipping point to full mental breakdown and could relate to the man’s state quite readily. A raft of unsettling thoughts raced in and out of the Flesk brain and a sardonic smile grazed his lips at how similar it all seemed to the bicycles brushing the chrome so perilously. —“Of course it’ll all be my fault,” El Wheels keened, and he slapped his hand off the wheel in...