Micheal Mac Liammoir
Theatre man
Finnuala O'Shannon
I think I've been aware of Micheal Mac Liammoir all my life, although I didn't meet him until I was twelve. He was, even then, a legend. Ireland produces many things but hardly ever glamour. And Micheal was truly glamorous in the way that Noel Coward was glamorous or Nureyev is today. He seems to have started being glamorous at about the age of eight; certainly by the age of sixteen he had attained an extraordinary degree of physical beauty. But the reaction he produced was not based on looks or on the fact that he was recognised as a great artist. What is it th4t makes a man in a lift take his hat off when Micheal gets in and promptly put it back on when Micheal get out? Or a young girl in a bus offer him her seat — twenty years ago, when Micheal, who always looked a great deal younger than his years was still in the prime of his life and in no need of such favours from anyone?
Micheal was not, I think, in the habit of riding on buses. We were standing in O'Connell Street waiting for a taxi and a hos came along. I said, 'Come on. It'll be quicker,' and we jumped on. He was left with the impression that buses were lovely and that he must try them again some time. But he was not divorced from reality. What of his remark last year that he could think of no other nation that could spend so much blood to be Irish and not even sPenk its own language? He was not only a Passionate Irish speaker but a passionate Irishman. He chose, with his life-long friend and partner, Hilton Edwards, to give his life and work to a place that many people would view as a backwater when, truly, the world could have been his stage. Instead, theY chose to bring the world to Ireland. Irish theatrical tradition being young in years, the Abbey Theatre was already 'old' when the Gate Theatre was founded, but the Abbey was then very much an 'Irish' theatre. Hilton and Micheal brought us the international theatre. This was in the heady days following the insurrection and civil war when to idealists like Micheal, it seemed that all the world was young. Was the world they left behind well lost to them? I think so. I never heard Micheal utter a word of regret for the road he had chosen, although the parish-puMP mentality which emerged in the Arts as elsewhere in Irish society made him write in 1962, `The Irish people, from being the classic example of resistance in history, are becoming, domestically and intellectuallY the most easily brow-beaten community in Europe.' It was inevitable, perhaps, given his manY talents, that he should have squandered
some of them. He himself felt that his
stage-designs and paintings were too much haunted by the ghost of Aubrey BeardsleY. And his many excellent plays, though always admired and well received, were t'3° uncompromisingly committed to wha,t interested him most in Ireland and the Jr to be the great popular success they illigh have been abroad had not his repugnanc,„ for the `stage-Irishman' prevented him fro"' perpetuating the prototype. I joined the Gate Theatre when ',vast seventeen and from then on Mich,:ea; became, after my father, the great guiaat influence of my life. Indeed, his book Eac" Actor on His Ass, a diary he kept of a to,111. we did in Egypt, is full of threats of tne letters he is about to write to my fat ,1about my appalling behaviour. And once; remember he bawled me out—quite right`Y — about something I had or had not done nn the stage and the next morning I found a letter of apology, covered with exquis.iite coloured drawings of spring flowers. ilia, must have stayed up half the night to do it '1 was Micheal who begged me not to eloPe with a man he felt would bring me nothing but unhappiness, and Micheal who wept with me when he was proved right.
He was always intensely interested in the lives of the people he worked with and Oa
0t Only the wittiest and most perceptive of 'alkers but also the most receptive and the kindest of audiences. His kindness as an raudience, in a different sense, is personified LID!' me by something that happened when ue did a stint as drama critic for the Observer some years ago. We went to see a .13,1a Y which shall be nameless — except to say it is about to be done by the National theatre and is by a Scandinavian gentleman 'Which we both though was appalling, and ' n°t Perfectly acted in every instance. I was surprised, therefore, the following Sunday to read a careful and good-natured review. When I asked him why, he said that being an actor and knowing the blood, sweat and teLurs that had gone into the production he ,srPIY couldn't bring himself to go on about "le things he hadn't liked so had concentrated on the things he had.
„ In the minds of all who knew him it is not
1Y the sick and aging man who died last manday but also the young man, ackndwledged as one of the handsomest of his generation, and the vigorous and enthusiastk and brilliant middle-aged man I knew und loved. I won't forget the excitement and Privilege of working with two masters of tfisetr craft but! won't forget either the sheer 11110f the many evenings spent sitting round gie supper table at No 4 Harcourt Terrace, after the show. Talking, arguing, often sctreaming and shouting, till the early hours °I the morning.
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