The school of hard knocks

A legendary victory by Munster over the All Blacks made for a legendary success of a play. Paul Meade describes what it was like to put on a pair of rugby boots and perform in Alone It Stands

That was October 1999. In April 2000 I received a call from my friend and fellow Limerickman, John Breen. Would I help him out? One of his actors was down and could I step in for a few weeks while he recovered? As out-of-work actors are prone to do, I said yes almost immediately.

The first night, the rest of the cast pushed and pulled me through my first show. There were frantic whispers: "What's next?", "Line Out", "Which one?", "Just follow me you fool!" That sort of on-the-spot side-coaching thing is easy in Alone it Stands, as the regularity of the laughs and the volume of the onstage cheers allow for all sorts of chat.

Just before the curtain call I had a horrible feeling that I may have ruined the show for everyone. These guys had been getting standing ovations for six months straight; would I be responsible for ending that? I needn't have worried – the crowd rose to their feet to applaud us and I felt an enormous sense of relief. I had cracked it.

It was during our run at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh that all my feelings of security and contentment in my role began to vanish. It started slowly. Some laughs that I had been getting weren't always there. For instance, a mention of Consulate cigarettes normally elicited a laugh of recognition that these were a particularly mild brand. I tried to think about the line, my physicality and my delivery. What was I doing wrong? I factored in the fact that this was the first non-Irish audience I had played to and that some of my lines referred to culturally specific items like Major cigarettes and red lemonade. The whole play, I began to think, works best with an Irish audience and their laughter is a laughter of recognition. A horrible thought: maybe the 'Irish' factor had papered over the cracks – of which I was one.

Another factor started to worry me during our stay in Edinburgh. When I first took over from Conor Delaney in Donegal, I was the only new cast member. The rest of the cast had created the show with writer-director John Breen over a five-week period the previous September. Now in Edinburgh there were only two original cast members left.

I began to miss things that I hadn't even realized were there before; a groan here, a shout there, an injection of pace or energy at the right moment, a noise that covered an uncertain moment. These were things that you couldn't learn, that weren't in the script. These moments had been created by the actors, they were part of the show but they had never been annotated in any way. How do you pass on a myriad of looks and gear changes and vocalizations?

Alone it Stands is a physically tiring show and people want to spend the minimum amount of time in the rehearsal room. So we achieved the basic shape of the show and were happy with that. I began to feel that something was missing because of this, but I didn't know how to get it back.

After a long, hard tour of Ireland we flew out to Tasmania. Here in a foreign land the spotlight would shine once again on any deficiencies in the play and the performances. What should have been cause for celebration – packed houses of Australians were laughing their socks off at a play that we thought peculiarly Irish – became a cause for concern in our glass half-empty world. We began to concentrate on the laughs that we weren't getting and forgot about the new laughs that had arrived.

We started saying Garryowen Rugby Club instead of just Garryowen and our Limerick accents had to be toned down and become more intelligible. I found that particularly hard. As the only Limerickman in the cast, the accuracy of my accent allowed me some comfort when laughs were in short supply.

The culture gap between us and the audience left some moments of "dead air" on the stage. Where once there had been a 30-second laugh, there was silence.

I had become hooked on laughs. A line, "Good man yourself", had brought the house down regularly in Ireland, believe it or not. In Australia, there were embarrassed titters for a man who was making a fool of himself onstage. I was like a junkie looking for a fix, elongating the line, deepening my voice, adding colour. I would have tried anything short of dropping my trousers.

Back in Ireland I regained my composure when the laughter started to flow more regularly but still I had questions. How could we retain the precision of the show and its original integrity over such a long period of time and with so many cast changes? I hit upon a very obvious and perhaps dangerous solution. Why didn't we look at the original video? Great idea, except no one could find it.

The show kept going, we played ever bigger houses, the Gaiety and the Olympia in Dublin, the Cork Opera House. People came to the show four and five times. We got standing ovations; people cried with laughter. In some ways the show just got better and better. But still we all scratched our own itches. John kept changing the ending trying to get it right. He kept rehearsing the moment where one of my characters gets tackled (a painful experience once a night, excruciating ten times a day in rehearsal). In rehearsals for the next tour the video finally reappeared.

In front of an audience the difference was audible. The show became a pleasure to do again. It felt right and enjoyable; we were no longer scrabbling around in the dark, we were confident and working like a team. I really believe that watching the video contributed to that, and I know it helped me. Then again, we finished that leg of the tour only four months later and with no cast changes. There is every reason to suspect that time, cast changes and the varying responses of audiences could contribute to a running down of any well-oiled machine.

I was like a junkie looking for a fix, elongating the line, deepening my voice, adding colour

I felt under an obligation to be funny as I was not the original creator of the role and this accentuated my sensitivity to all these factors. I realize that no performance piece can ever be passed on intact from one performer to another. A script cannot capture every gesture, a prompt book cannot accurately describe each individual performer. Performances are elusive, changing things and anything can happen on any given night. Hamlet admits as much when he says, 'let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them'. But I can't help thinking that, like this clown, Shakespeare himself would have killed for a video.

?More This is an abridged version of an article by Paul Meade in the book The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre. The book was published in 2004 by Carysfort Press. and is available at www.carysfortpress.com.

Alone It Stands by John Breen is playing at the Olympia Theatre until 29 January 2005.