busy, bustling street packed with stressed-out Christmas shoppers tripping over each other to grab their last minute bargains…everyone laden down with bulging bags, looking frozen and panicky and with mounting hysteria practically ricocheting off them…and I can’t help thinking that it’s just the loveliest sight I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. But then I suppose, after living in the dark for so long, a glimpse of the light can suddenly make you giddy.
Tell you one thing; even if I don’t get this job, at least one good thing has already come out of it – just being back in the city and doing an audition has put the bounce back into me and aligned my spine again, as if I just got a jolt of vitamin B straight to my heart. And a flood of gorgeous, cheering memories come back too; when Danand I first left school, we both came to Dublin to study at Trinity College, him to do veterinary medicine, me, drama studies.
We shared flat after flat in the city, gradually working our poverty-stricken, dole-poor way from renting places where the washing machine had to double up as the dining table, all the way up to the dizzy heights of actually owning our very own apartment right after we got married. Happy, happy days – by far the happiest of my life – and now it’s like every street corner I turn holds a very different memory of a very different time.
Buoyed up with adrenaline, I run into a little coffee shop just across the road from the theatre to grab a bottle of water and no one knows me or any of my business and it’s bloody fantastic. No one asks me about Dan or Audrey or whether Jules has any intention of getting some kind of a job any time soon. No Bridie McCoy telling us about how useless her chiropodist is, no Agnes Quinn to playfully elbow me in the ribs and remind me that I’m not getting any younger, then ask me when exactly I’m going to put that huge nursery up in The Moorings to good use? No Father O’Driscoll to gently probe me about whether he might see myself and Dan at Mass one of these fine days…I am utterly and totally anonymous here and it’s wonderful. Feels like being able to breathe freely again after years of long, silent suffocation.
I bounce along to the stage door of the National and the receptionist is almost flight attendant friendly. Yes, they’re expecting me and I’m to go ahead to the green room and wait there. She politely offers me tea or coffee while I’m waiting and I thank her but say no. Then I find my way to the green room which is directly behind the main stage,guessing that some other poor actress is out there strutting her stuff right now. I plonk down on a faded leather armchair and start thumbing through the script yet again.
Fag Ash Hil was at pains to point out that, at this stage, I wasn’t expected to have actually memorised the lines, considering the short notice I’d been given to come and read for the part in the first place, but I know well enough how these things work. You’re told, ‘Oh, no need to be off book, darling,’ but the reality is that you’re expected to have studied the script the same way Egyptologists study tomb writings and it doesn’t matter a shite how late in the day you got the script.
So I’m just re-reading through a pivotal scene for the character when the door opens and the stage manager comes to get me. No time to react, no time for nerves. I get up and obediently follow him.
Two minutes later, and I’m standing on stage and it’s beyond weird having sat in the audience last night, now to be over on this side of the fence. The set, by the way, is a health spa in a five-star resort, with sun loungers dotted across the stage and offstage doors leading to a sauna, pool and steam room. It’s dimly lit and hard to see, then suddenly a split second later, it suddenly goes Broadway bright. I’m momentarily dazzled but then a disconnected voice from the dark auditorium tells me to come on down to the front of the
Tell you one thing; even if I don’t get this job, at least one good thing has already come out of it – just being back in the city and doing an audition has put the bounce back into me and aligned my spine again, as if I just got a jolt of vitamin B straight to my heart. And a flood of gorgeous, cheering memories come back too; when Danand I first left school, we both came to Dublin to study at Trinity College, him to do veterinary medicine, me, drama studies.
We shared flat after flat in the city, gradually working our poverty-stricken, dole-poor way from renting places where the washing machine had to double up as the dining table, all the way up to the dizzy heights of actually owning our very own apartment right after we got married. Happy, happy days – by far the happiest of my life – and now it’s like every street corner I turn holds a very different memory of a very different time.
Buoyed up with adrenaline, I run into a little coffee shop just across the road from the theatre to grab a bottle of water and no one knows me or any of my business and it’s bloody fantastic. No one asks me about Dan or Audrey or whether Jules has any intention of getting some kind of a job any time soon. No Bridie McCoy telling us about how useless her chiropodist is, no Agnes Quinn to playfully elbow me in the ribs and remind me that I’m not getting any younger, then ask me when exactly I’m going to put that huge nursery up in The Moorings to good use? No Father O’Driscoll to gently probe me about whether he might see myself and Dan at Mass one of these fine days…I am utterly and totally anonymous here and it’s wonderful. Feels like being able to breathe freely again after years of long, silent suffocation.
I bounce along to the stage door of the National and the receptionist is almost flight attendant friendly. Yes, they’re expecting me and I’m to go ahead to the green room and wait there. She politely offers me tea or coffee while I’m waiting and I thank her but say no. Then I find my way to the green room which is directly behind the main stage,guessing that some other poor actress is out there strutting her stuff right now. I plonk down on a faded leather armchair and start thumbing through the script yet again.
Fag Ash Hil was at pains to point out that, at this stage, I wasn’t expected to have actually memorised the lines, considering the short notice I’d been given to come and read for the part in the first place, but I know well enough how these things work. You’re told, ‘Oh, no need to be off book, darling,’ but the reality is that you’re expected to have studied the script the same way Egyptologists study tomb writings and it doesn’t matter a shite how late in the day you got the script.
So I’m just re-reading through a pivotal scene for the character when the door opens and the stage manager comes to get me. No time to react, no time for nerves. I get up and obediently follow him.
Two minutes later, and I’m standing on stage and it’s beyond weird having sat in the audience last night, now to be over on this side of the fence. The set, by the way, is a health spa in a five-star resort, with sun loungers dotted across the stage and offstage doors leading to a sauna, pool and steam room. It’s dimly lit and hard to see, then suddenly a split second later, it suddenly goes Broadway bright. I’m momentarily dazzled but then a disconnected voice from the dark auditorium tells me to come on down to the front of the
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