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 of Teddy Brewster, the unhinged nephew who blows his bugle at all hours and thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. The following day, Jean texted me to say I could play this deluded dolt. Thankfully, she didn't say I was a natural.
So this luvvie was returning to the stage. Not the Gate or the Abbey, but the more lacklustre landscape of the Portmarnock Sports and Leisure Club - no disrespect intended, I hasten to add.
During the weeks of rehearsal, I recalled an interview with Aidan Gillen in which the actor claimed the adrenaline that flows through an actor's system during a live theatre performance is equivalent to the amount that goes through a body during a car crash.
As this sank in I wondered if Gillen was telling a cryptic joke. After all, don't all actors pray they won't give a car crash performance on stage? Thankfully, I didn't crash in Arsenic. The whole troupe did well, as did the set designer and the costume lady, over three nights in May.
A few months later we began rehearsing The Importance of Being Earnest for a performance in the more prestigious Helix - albeit in the Space, its 150-seat theatre. The Mahony Hall, with its 1260 seats, was not for us amateurs.
I had the minor role of Merriman, the butler. I was a bit put out by my lack of lines but felt better when the actor playing Reverend Chasuble told me: "There are no small parts in Oscar Wilde." It was a comforting and thespy thing to say, and just what I needed to hear at that moment of crisis.
People always ask how much I'm paid for appearing on stage and are surprised to discover that amateur actors are paid nothing. "All that time and effort and you don't get a bean?" people are wont to say. I could try to explain the non-monetary rewards of artistic endeavour, that giddy feeling when you're delivering lines without a safety net. I could even use words like "passion" and "creativity" but I'm wise enough not to.
Our next play is a Noël Coward/Agatha Christie mash-up called Death by Design. I'm playing a fervent 1930s socialist radical. I may be in my forties but twice in the script I'm referred to as a "tousled youth" and a "fanatical youth". It's one of the consolations of working for free and getting to inhabit another character for a two-hour adrenaline ride.
© Brian Ahern 2015
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