We present an extract from A Coat of Many Colours, a new collection of essays celebrating the life and work of the late Colm Ó Briain; a former Director of the Arts Council, Director of NCAD, founder of Project Arts Centre, a Special Advisor to then Arts Minister Michael D. Higgins between 1993 and 1997, and a key figure in the Irish arts over the past half century.
In A Coat of Many Colours, family, friends and colleagues from the arts community contribute essays to create a fascinating portrait of a singular personality, his influence and legacy.
Read Memories that Counted by Peter Sheridan below.
Memories that Counted
I first met Colm when he adjudicated at the Roundwood Drama Festival in 1970. I was there with the Saint Laurence O'Toole’s Musical and Dramatic Society—better and more familiarly known as Slot Players—where we presented our production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The first thing that struck me was Colm’s shirt. It didn’t have a regular collar or regular buttons. It looked more like a kaftan. It was Asian and it was flamboyant. And he was comfortable in it, I could tell. I would love to have worn something like it but I didn’t have the courage or the confidence. I was at an age where I still dressed to please my mother.
Waiting for Godot was not a play that was seen on the amateur circuit and it didn’t go down well with the Roundwood audience. Some of them left with a clatter during the first act, making no secret of their displeasure. Others waited until after the show was over to vent their anger and their fury. Colm stepped on stage and delivered an adjudication that defended the play and the production. He acknowledged that Beckett was difficult and he commended Slot Players for 'their bravery in putting it on’. More than once he reminded the audience that good theatre and good art didn’t exist without controversy.
My brother Jim—only ever known to the family as Shea—received the trophy for Best Director at Roundwood. I picked up the award for Best Supporting Actor for my portrayal of Vladimir. Colm was working as a television producer in RTÉ at this time and a few months later we got a message to the house that he was developing a children’s programme called Motley. There were to be two presenters and he wanted Jim to audition for the male role. I was disgusted. He hadn’t even seen Jim act. I was the better actor of the two of us and Colm was making a terrible mistake. I hid my disappointment as best I could and got on with studying for my exams. Da took me aside and told me that as I didn’t have my Leaving Certificate, I wasn’t eligible to work for RTÉ, it was against the law. So Jim became a television star—everyone in Sheriff Street called him Motley—and I lived on in obscurity and regret.
I was surprised when I got a call from Colm asking me to meet him in the Project Arts Centre which was situated at that time in the basement of the YMCA in Lower Abbey Street, directly across from the Peacock Theatre. It was the first time I had ever been inside an arts centre. There were paintings on the wall with numbers beside them and some of them had red dots, too. There was a receptionist sitting behind an office desk and she was typing but the thing that caught my attention was her mauve lipstick. I’d never seen that colour lipstick before. Her name was Rachel Doyne and while she looked flamboyant, she spoke in a clear, working-class Dublin accent. Colm was running late, she explained.
‘He’s a busy, busy man, but you probably know that.’
‘Yeah, my brother Jim works with him out in RTÉ.’
‘He’s a clever man, too. The cleverest man I know.’
I asked her about the red dots and she explained that meant the work was sold. There were wooden and stone sculptures sitting on plinths, dotted around the floor, but very few of them displayed red dots. They were very expensive, so I wasn’t surprised. Eventually Colm arrived, apologised and got straight down to business.
‘This is a gallery at the moment but I want it to be a theatre space as well. We’ve had one or two plays on here but I’m thinking about a season with lunchtime shows, evening shows and late-night shows at the weekend, Friday and Saturday. I’ll need a stage manager and Shea says you’re very practical.’
‘Shea said that about me. That I was very practical.’
‘No, that’s a lie. He said you were a brilliant organiser. Are you surprised by that?’
‘Yeah, I am, a bit.’
‘Shea thinks the world of you but, sure, you know that, I’m sure. You’re brothers, after all.’
Shea and me were forever in competition with one another. I’d gotten a pair of boxing gloves from Santy when I was ten and the routine was that we got one glove each, stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and went at one another full tilt. Da acted as a referee and there wasn’t a bout between us that didn’t end in a draw and a row. The truth is that the age difference tilted things in Shea’s favour—he was three years older than me—and he hurt me more than I hurt him. But he was saying nice things about me to Colm Ó Briain so I forgave him for all the punches to the head.
My main job as stage manager of Project was to turn the venue into a theatre and back into a gallery when the performance had finished. Colm’s mantra was simple—keep the artists happy and you’ll have no problems. But that was easier said than done. You don’t realise quite how heavy stone sculptures are until you try to move them. On your own. And paintings are easy to take down but not as easy to put back in exactly the same place. So I did my best after the first show ended—it was a poetry reading for about twenty patrons—only to realise that someone in the audience had moved the red dots. And the stone sculptures weren’t on the same plinths and some of them looked ridiculous. I stood in the centre of the space and wondered what I could do. It was hopeless. I rang Rachel Doyne and appraised her of the situation.
‘Stay where you are and don’t panic. I’ll send Jonathan down to you.’
The Jonathan in question was Jonathan Wade. An artist who had a painting in the exhibition. He arrived on his Honda 50 and parked it at the street level railings. I watched him as he came bounding down the steps and in through the door.
‘So what’s your problem, comrade?’
He was the first real painter I’d ever met and he was a breath of fresh air. Educated by the Christian Brothers, like myself, he wanted to know what my politics were and how much I was getting paid for stage managing the gig.
‘Don’t work for nothing,’ he said to me.
‘I’m not. Colm is paying me.’
‘Of course he is. You won’t go wrong there. He’s a man with a conscience.’
Jonathan helped me put the exhibition back in place and then he gave me a lift home to Seville Place on the back of his Honda 50. He talked non-stop on the bike but I only picked up about a tenth of what he said. It was all political speak. The North. The Provos. The Stickies. Bank robberies. European terrorism. The Baader Meinhof. Censorship. Project 67. Standing on the steps outside my home on Seville Place, it was Jonathan who explained the origins of Project and the infamous night at the Gate Theatre when Edna O’Brien and others challenged the Irish State by reading from their banned books.
‘All art is political,’ Jonathan informed me. ‘You’re either part of the process of changing society or you’re part of keeping things the way they are. No one gets a free ride, my friend.’
Jonathan blew into my life in a whirlwind and just as quickly he blew out of it again. In January of 1973 he was tragically killed in a motor bike accident. He was thirty-one years old. Without him I never would have survived that Project baptism of fire.
The most controversial play in that first season at Project was Journal of a Hole which I was directing for Slot Players. Written by Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, the Hole of the title was Artane Industrial School, the prison for children out on the Malahide Road run by the Irish Christian Brothers. The play was based on the first-hand experiences of Robert Sheeran, a native of Sheriff Street who’d been sent there at the age of eight and released when he was fourteen. He now played guitar in a rock band with me.
I was anxious to get Colm’s imprimatur on what we were doing. There were some graphic scenes in the play. One depicted a boy in a baby’s nappy being made to stand by his bed all night because he was a ‘bed-wetter’. Some people thought that Colm might defer the production until he had sought out a legal opinion. They thought we should keep him away from it. I was adamant that we let him see a run-through.
There was a scene in the school yard where the young Robert accidentally crosses the white line that separates the junior and senior boys. For this transgression, one of the Brothers punches him on the nose and it starts to bleed. He’s told to clean up the mess. So he washes his nose under the yard tap. But he doesn’t clean all of the blood. So the Brother punches him again and gives him the same instruction again. I had an actor dressed as a Christian Brother sitting in the audience—a plant—and at this scene he jumped up and started shouting. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves putting such lies on the stage,’ the plant roared out, ‘ashamed.’ Then he stormed out of Project and up the stairs to the street.
Colm thought the play might provoke a response from the Christian Brothers. But that was only one side of the story.
‘I think it’s a welcome exposé of the industrial school system.’
‘Do you think that’s over the top, having someone interrupt the play like that,’ I asked him.
‘No. You just have to make sure he’s believable, one hundred per cent believable.’
Colm had an issue with the collar. And he felt the brown shoes were not something a cleric would wear. Clerics only ever wore black. Colm had been educated by the Jesuits in Belvedere College. He didn’t make mistakes when it came to clerical dress code. His reaction to the run-through and his positive words to us afterwards, filled everyone with renewed confidence. Kane Archer, the theatre critic who reviewed it for The Irish Times, gave over two paragraphs of his notice to the ‘enraged Cleric’ who stood up and tried to shout down the play. Nobody in Slot Players got paid for their services. I got paid for my stage management work but I kept that to myself. Almost. The only other person I told was Sheila O’Donoghue. She helped out with the coffee and occasionally operated the lights as well. Fran Roe, her college friend she was Shea’s girlfriend—had introduced us.
We became inseparable. I helped her with her college essays and she helped me with Project. In no time at all, Sheila was expecting a baby. We wanted to get married. My father tried to talk me out of it and her father tried to talk her out of it, too. But we were determined. I was supposed to be starting in college but I didn’t care about college. I only cared about being with Sheila and our new baby. I didn’t mind if I had to work. I loved stage management. Loved the theatre. Loved the Project. I went to see Colm. I asked him was he happy with my work.
‘You’ve done really well. You’re an excellent stage manager.’
I asked him about job opportunities in television, particularly in front of camera.
‘There are no openings for presenters out in RTÉ I’m afraid.’
‘I could do floor manager. I’d even say I could be a camera operator.’
‘You need to go to college. You need to read. Join the drama society. Broaden your horizons.’
‘I could stay on in Project if there was enough work for me. I love the place.’
‘Project will still be here when you come out of college. Trust me. You need to get your degree above all else.’
Sheila and I got married in 1971 on Oscar Wilde’s birthday, 16 October. I spent the next three years in Belfield, where I studied for six months of the year and worked for the other six months. I got involved in Dramsoc in first year and then I dropped out to become a bus conductor. Our son, Rossa, was born in the middle of my first-year exams—12 May 1972. Two years later I graduated with an honours degree in English and Philosophy. The Project Arts Centre was still alive but it had moved from Lower Abbey Street to South King Street beside the Dandelion Market. A group of us from UCD had set up a company to tour children’s theatre to schools. We rehearsed occasionally in Project but then word came down the line that the lease was up and Project would have to find a new premises. I decided to write my first proper play. I bought a manual typewriter, covered the keys with paper and learned how to type.
Project found a new home in East Essex Street. A large, two-storey building previously occupied by Dollard Printers. Shea thought it was a perfect space for my play which I had entitled It’s a Fair Squat but Don’t Get Caught. The place was a building site when I first visited there. Groups of people were beavering away trying to make it habitable. There were no seats. The roof leaked. There were toilets but no cubicles. Urinals but no pipes. Someone was building banked seating—Alan Stanford I think, but he’d run out of foam. A man was building a projection room for a cinema that didn’t yet exist. Two women were mixing cement. Alan Devlin offered to help them but they turned him down. An actor was sitting on the ground trying to learn lines from a play. Where’s Colm, I thought. Where the f**k is Colm?
Colm was in Merrion Square. Number 70. Headquarters of the Arts Council of Ireland. An Comhairle Ealaíon. He was the new director of it. Holy s**t. What did that mean? Was it good news or bad news? Should I leg it up to Merrion Square and tell him what was going on? Did he even know that I had graduated from college with my honours degree? The thing was that Colm and Muireann had lived at the bottom of Rutland Street, adjacent to Seán MacDermott Street, and I sometimes knocked on their door when I was passing. But Sheila and I had moved out to a mobile home in Crumlin after we were married. I wasn’t often in the area of the north inner city after that.
The Arts Council made a small renovation grant available to Project and Shea wanted to know if any of it could be put towards the play. The answer was a definite but emphatic No. In the circumstances, we did what we always did. We borrowed and we stole. John Olohan, one of the actors in the show, took responsibility for the set. In the laneway next to Project, John spotted a discarded No Entry sign that he thought would be great for the play. It was the perfect metaphor. I immediately changed the play title to No Entry. There were houses being knocked down on Dorset Street. We rescued a hall door and a window and made Robert Nolan’s flat in Seán MacDermott Street with them.
No Entry opened to positive reviews and good houses. There just seemed to be an energy about Project. And not just the theatre but the gallery and the cinema, too. And the music end of things was taking shape. We were getting invitations from around the country—Clifden, Listowel, Cork, Belfast and Edinburgh. We were making a mark and so too was Colm up in Merrion Square. Out of the blue, he announced a cut of twenty thousand pounds in the Arts Council’s grant to the Dublin Theatre Festival. Nothing like this had ever happened in the arts world before. It was a nuclear bomb. The Festival’s director, Brendan Smith, went on the attack. He seemed to have some powerful supporters in his corner, chief amongst them Charlie Haughey. The Smith and Haughey families were close and that was largely down to the friendship between Beryl Fagan, Brendan Smith’s wife, and Maureen Haughey, who was wife to Charlie and daughter to Seán Lemass.
It wasn’t lost on some commentators that the Project Arts Centre might have been the beneficiary of the loss suffered by the Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF). In the year of this debacle, 1977, Project received a substantial increase in its annual funding. However, as its base funding was low, it wasn’t a huge amount of money. It wasn’t a difficult increase to defend. Shea and I, as joint artistic directors of the Centre, for example, both worked full time but we split a salary between us. Indeed, at the time when this row was brewing, we were talking to the DTF about producing a play with them that was too big for Project Arts Centre. The play in question was The Liberty Suit.
Set in Saint Patrick’s Institution and with a cast of sixteen, it told the story of Gerard Mannix Flynn and how he had been abandoned and abused by the State from infancy to adulthood. I had written the play with his collaboration and not alone that, but Shea had cast him in the leading role. Colm was one hundred per cent behind the play. For him it was very much in tune with the social realism of Journal of a Hole, holding up a mirror to Irish society and forcing our audience to look at the uglier side of who and what we purported to be.
The Liberty Suit became a major hit and the DTF got a whole new lease of life. The Project Arts Centre, ironically, had saved the day. Brendan Smith was beaming when he announced that the DTF grant would be restored to its former level. The artistic programme for Project was expanding in all directions and so too was our ambition. But we had a fundamental problem and that was uncertainty of tenure. We could be turfed out of our premises at any time. So we floated the idea of buying the building with Colm. He embraced it from the get-go. He knew this would be transformational. But there were difficult waters to navigate, political and artistic. He steered the ship. He was our Arts Council champion and we couldn’t have done it without his support and ingenuity.
Jim and I were at the helm for five years and I was exhausted by the time we quit. It was 1981 and I didn’t want to see the inside of a theatre for another five years. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But five months would have done me some good. In the North of Ireland the IRA had started a hunger strike and across the water Margaret Thatcher was digging trenches and preparing her people for war. In Dublin, Colm Ó Briain was busy working with Tony Cronin and others on an aspiration of Charlie Haughey’s to establish an academy of artists and writers. It was to be called Aosdána. The important news was that its members would be entitled to a stipend so that they could concentrate full time on their artistic output. This seemed perfect for me. We had added two girls and a boy to our family and that meant six mouths to feed. A stipend was just what I needed. I could not believe that I didn’t meet the age requirement for Aosdána
membership. I rang Colm thinking that there had to be a way around this.
‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait. The age requirement is non-negotiable.’
‘So if Mozart applied you’d turn him down, is that what you’re telling me.’
‘Yes. There’s no place for Mozart until he turns thirty.’
‘That’s stupid, really stupid. I can’t believe you’re enforcing that rule. Sounds like you’re setting up a club for old-age pensioners.’
We argued the toss and always ended up back at the same place. Colm was above everything else a brilliant debater and he had answers for every argument I put forward. In the end, I just threw in the towel.
I applied for an Arts Council bursary and was successful. Being shut out of Aosdána wasn’t as financially painful as it might otherwise have been. Sheila was still keen for me to be in Aosdána but I’d taken a stand and felt I couldn’t go back on my decision. It took me thirty-two years to change my mind. The year was 2014 and I was performing a one-man show at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght. It was based on my theatre memoir, Break a Leg, and in it I told the story of how Jim and I met Colm Ó Briain at the Roundwood Drama Festival and how that encounter shaped both of our lives.
On the Friday night of the run there was a message at the stage door that Colm and Muireann were in the house and would love to see me for a drink afterwards. We met in the bar beside the restaurant. Colm did not look well. I asked him how we was and, forthright as ever, he told me he was suffering with diabetes, Type 2. He returned the question to me and I told him briefly about my throat cancer and how I seemed to have come out the other side of it. Having exchanged war stories, we smiled at one another. They were both very complimentary about the show.
‘Colm is sorry he gave up directing for the theatre,’ Muireann said.
‘He’s jealous that you’re still doing it. Aren’t you, love?’
‘There is nothing that compares to good theatre,’ Colm said.
‘I’d love you to direct my next show,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know that I could afford you.’
‘I don’t know that I’ll be available. I’ll have to check my medical diary, I’m afraid!’
We had a wonderful chat, mainly about the early days of Project and some of the great characters that were no longer with us. I walked them out to the car park and it turned out they’d parked right in front of me. I sat in my car and watched them pull away. Colm had touched my life so deeply and he had left such a legacy to for all those who worked in the arts sector in Ireland. So I made a decision. I got home and announced it to Sheila.
‘Sheila, I’m going to do what I said I’d never do. I’m going to get someone to propose me for Aosdána.’ I did and six months later, at the age of sixty-two, they let me in. Thank you, Colm. I got there in the end.
A Coat of Many Colours is published by Martello
About The Author: Peter Sheridan is author of the plays Entry (1976), Emigrants (1978), Bust (1982), Diary of a Hunger Strike (1982), and Finders Keepers (2005). The plays were seen in Dublin, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Edinburgh. He also wrote a series of memoirs based around his family, beginning with 44: A Dublin Memoir, Forty-Seven Roses and Break A Leg. Film direction includes The Breakfast, which won a Rocky at Banff and he co-wrote and directed the feature Borstal Boy, based on the book by Brendan Behan. Awards include The Rooney Prize for Literature, 1977. He was the Abbey Theatre's Writer in Residence in 1980; and with his brother Jim, was joint Artistic Director of the Project Arts Centre, 1975-81. He was elected to Aosdána in 2014.
