A Night at the Theatre

About twenty-five years ago I was going through a phase. It was called chronic self-consciousness. There was a play on in Andrew’s Lane theatre that I wanted to see. I’ve racked my brains to remember the title but can’t. However, I do remember certain particulars of the night I went.

I had no girlfriend at the time and was extremely bashful about the idea of going to see a play on my own. Oddly enough I had no problem attending the cinema unaccompanied but for some reason (perhaps it’s of a higher cultural and aesthetic grade) a play was a completely different story.

So off I popped to the box office a few days beforehand and, incredible as it seems to me now, I bought two tickets!

The sad aspect is that I knew I had nobody to attend the play with me but I didn't want the person I was buying the tickets from to see that I was only purchasing one ticket. I had no desire to elicit looks of pitying sympathy from the box office staff.

Duly, the night of the play rolled round and I made my way to Andrew’s Lane. I took up a position in the foyer while people milled about chatting among themselves waiting for the doors of the auditorium to open and the show to begin. As the time dragged on, I began to feel distinctly awkward and conspicuous. All along my plan had been to affect the demeanour of a guy waiting on his date, so as to avoid the excruciating shame of looking like a total saddo who had nobody with whom he could attend the theatre. To that effect I repeatedly glanced at the main doors and then at my watch, keeping a calm expression on my face, trying to convey by the power of my body language alone the notion that: “She should be along at any minute; you know what she’s like, she’s always running late.” Reflecting on that night all these years later I think for the most part I was putting on this charade to becalm myself more than for anyone else.

The thought that I might attract an audience to my tortured efforts was not even uppermost in my mind.

But an audience of at least one person I did attract as, of a sudden, an elderly American man sidled up to me and dolefully announced: “It looks like she ain’t going to show up, son.”

How I cringed. If only he knew! I practically squirmed on the spot.

It transpired that the old man was at the theatre unaccompanied, too, and was simply looking for a bit of conversation. And I was the obvious choice. At the first opportunity I dutifully produced the second ticket from my pocket to prove my bona fides, so to speak, and we both proceeded to lament the unreliability of womenfolk.

We ended up sitting together in the front row for the duration of the play. He availed of the spare seat beside me with the promise that if she did turn up he would go back to his own seat. And we had a good chat at the interval before parting ways with a handshake when the play was over. I never saw the man again and his name, if he even told me, is long since lost in the mists of my memory.

The thing I do remember most vividly about the night, though, is my own, if I may call it, consummate performance as “boy in foyer waiting for girl”.

©Brian Ahern 2016