Belfield Days: Taking us back to his student days in 1979, Gerry Stembridge tells the story of a chilling realisation in his cold bedsit – and his life-changing insight a little later in the LGs of Belfield, home to UCD's Dramsoc…
Never Too Late
It was early March 1979 and I left the UCD campus mid-afternoon and went to my bedsit, a little back room over a shop in Windy Arbour, £5 a week.
Now, normally I haunted Belfield morning, noon and night. The Arts block was my stately pleasure-dome, my wonderful everyday and my Sunday best. My bedsit was for sleeping in and writing last-minute essays in. Being there in the afternoon was just weird.
Even stranger, I fell asleep. When I woke it was dark and, not having turned on the two-bar electric fire, very very cold. Through the grogginess something dawned on me and I checked the time. Oh god! It was …well it was sometime after 8 pm. And you see, I was acting in a play in Dramsoc that had started at 8.
But let's rewind a bit. Two years before, in Freshers' Week, Dramsoc was one of the 10 or so college societies I'd joined, once I got over the shock that the University Drama Society did not operate from an ancient ornate hall with a raised stage – my 17 year-old's notion of theatre.
Dramsoc HQ was a cold black box space in the basement of the Arts building, called, with little regard for the romance of it all, LG1. Folding doors which gave access to the equally glamorous LG2. Nonetheless, production photos on display of the previous year's triumph, Shakespeare's Richard II, suggested that some kind of magic could be created. I parted with my precious 50p and joined.
Some of my new college friends were convinced I was wasting my money. Dramsoc was a clique, weird types, a nest of homosexuals, an appalling stereotype which I am very glad to say I discovered to be largely true. But the notion that this coven was unfriendly was not. The very first time I summoned up the courage to audition for a play, The Bedsitting Room by my comic hero Spike Milligan, I was welcomed and cast in a leading role. So here I was, starting my college life, acting in a play called The Bedsitting Room and renting my own bed sitting room. I was free as a bird.
I became I admit, an inordinately selfish member of Dramsoc. Not for me the tiresome business of hunting down props, sticking up posters or manning the box-office. I acted. I soaked up applause and laughter. Even learning lines was a tedious necessity, though I usually got there by opening night, while testing the nervous systems of my more studious fellow-performers, But I had never, ever missed a performance. So waking up in my bedsit when the show I was in had already started, was a new and scary experience.
The play, by the way, was Brand by Ibsen, directed by Dr Joseph Long, a lecturer in the French Department. Remember the Richard II production photographs that had impressed me in Freshers’ Week two years before? He directed that. Something of a Dramsoc legend, everyone wanted to be in a Joe Long production, including myself, although – dark secret – I'd read Ibsen's Brand and thought it was spectacularly boring. When Joe offered me the minor role of the Provost I found myself experiencing a very peculiar form of envy. I really disliked the play, but was furious not to have been offered the lead role. Perhaps missing my play's curtain time was some unconsciously psychotic howl of rage against Ibsen, Brand, Dr Joseph Long and the whole wretched production?
Well, I had no time to consider this fascinating psychological question, because I was grabbing a coat in the dark and cantering from my bedsit, out under the shadow of Dundrum mental hospital, along Bird avenue, spinning left and then right at the Clonskeagh entrance to Belfield and sprinting down the ridiculously long avenue past dark playing fields and the looming water tower, to the science block and the lake, into the maw of the Arts building and down, down to the basement and LG1.
It was almost 9 o clock. Through the buzzing audience, I spotted three faces huddled together in tense conversation. The auditor of Dramsoc, the Stage Manager and Dr Joseph Long. And now a reveal. An anti-climax perhaps. I had reluctantly accepted a smaller role in Brand. I did not mention that the character of the Provost did not appear until the second half – when as it happens, he had quite a big scene, but that's by the way – so though I had been AWOL for the entire first half and created serious trauma for the production team, I had not actually missed my bit.
Joe Long glared at my sweating, panting self and was brief: Get changed, please. In the gloom of LG2, he who had been about to read in my part clambered out of the soutane and amusing hat that was my costume. And, without a whiff of warmup, on I went. My scene… well, I remember nothing about it. It was fine I think. Everything had worked out fine really.
Afterwards, as I was getting out of my costume I saw Joe coming towards me. I sighed and thought, here we go. Remember this director was not a fellow-student, he was Dr Joseph Long of the French department. I was resigned to a terrible tirade, a monumental dressing-down. Joe spoke in a cold but very even voice, 'You may have no respect for your own work, Gerry, but please have some respect for mine.' And he walked away.
That I can remember his words precisely, 42 years later, indicates the intensity of their effect. No lengthy harangue could have humbled me more than that crisp sentence. Not only did I appreciate and regret the stress I had caused my fellow students, I realised something else for the first time: 'You may have no respect for your own work,' he said, and my pain at this judgement told me that my involvement in Dramsoc was no passing college fling, but a serious affair. I had never given it a second's thought, but now felt at least a flicker of understanding that this theatre thing involved giving as much respect and applause as I received. If, that is, I wanted to do it right at all.
It is generally understood that going to college may change someone's life; what is not always appreciated is that the life-changing bit can happen, not in moments of achievement, but of shame. However, in a story about new insights I should emphasise that one important detail remains unchanged since that time: trust me, Ibsen's Brand really is boring.
Gerry Stembridge is a writer and theatre and film director.
Part of Sunday Miscellany: Belfield Days, a special programme marking 50 years of UCD at the Belfield campus, first broadcast Sunday 31 January 2021. Listen back to the full programme here.