Lessons in life, love and literature: Bohemian Dublin taught me well
Award-winning actor, musician and director Dominic West has added his colourful memories of studying at Trinity College and living in Dublin to a new book
EDUCATING RITA was in some part responsible for my going to Trinity. In the play by Willy Russell, Rita attends a red-brick university in the north of England and I was struck that the film had transposed her to a beautiful campus of classical stone facades and cobbled squares, filled with bright, questing, long-haired students. I later discovered this was Trinity College and that it was bang in the middle of Dublin, a city I had long mythologised from reading Leon Uris, as the spiritual home of my courageous forebears.
My mother read law at Trinity in the 1950s, but hadn’t lasted very long because of strictures imposed on her by Archbishop McQuaid. As a Catholic, she was forbidden to attend but since she had grown up in England, and so was probably damned anyway, he granted her dispensation to go, provided she only went to lectures and didn’t socialise. She had to be off campus every day at six and regrettably, after only a year, she left in search of wider confines.
Nevertheless, she cherished a romantic yearning for Ireland, not least because her parents were Irish, and she passed that on to me.
My grandfather had gone to the Royal College of Surgeons and my sister was in her final year there when I arrived. She lived in Galloping Green, Stillorgan, with two friends. I went to live with them, cycling up and down the dual-carriageway every day to and from our box housing estate, which Brendan Kennelly later referred to as the sort of doll’s house Ibsen was writing about.
It wasn’t quite the romantic Dublin I’d had in mind. That came later in the person of Juliette Gruber, a wonderful actress and the niece of Walter Matthau. She was in her final year studying philosophy and lived with Vanessa Soudine, a Trinidadian/Irish beauty. Vanessa’s spray of curly dark hair perfectly complemented Juliette’s spray of blonde curls as they studied together in the Berkeley Library or at the Winding Stair cafe or sauntered picturesquely up the Liffey to their flat in Arbour Hill. I was entranced and learned poems to woo her.
Together we explored the romantic corners of old Dublin: Boland’s Mill and the Grand Canal Basin; Beggar’s Bush Barracks; Smithfield; the Dockers Pub; St James’s Gate; Mountjoy Square; Poolbeg Street; North Great George’s Street — all untouched for decades and incredibly atmospheric in their decay. Juliette took me to the house in Henrietta Street where she had lived for two years with the Casey family: two artists and their six children, living frugally but magnificently among the bare floorboards and crumbling walls of a dilapidated Georgian palace. I was transported. This was it. Bohemia Hiberniae. I’d come home.
I studied English and drama. The drama department was still in its infancy, founded and run by John McCormack in rooms on Westland Row. I only just missed the boom time, when Ireland took off and the spectacular Samuel Beckett Centre was opened. In 1991 it was all pretty rudimentary: creaky floorboards and sash windows like guillotines, that Steve Wilmer, the department number two, would crash down to rouse us from slumbers induced by the history of Kabuki theatre.
John McCormack was a gentle soul, completely obsessed with puppets. He directed us in several shows, most memorably his own translation of de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, which ended with a puppet show that was unquestionably John’s favourite part. He had been a star of the French department, like Sam Beckett, to whom he wrote to ask if he could name his new drama department after him. Beckett’s reply was pinned to the wall: a postcard with two words: ‘Yes. Sam’.
I soon joined Players, which was run by Gemma Bodinetz, a sassy, raven-haired dynamo, who now runs the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. I remember her rolling around a rehearsal room floor shouting, “I am woman”. She had me do something similar in a play called Fando & Lis, which I did with Juliette and my great friend Dominic Geraghty. It was intensely serious, with lots of bondage and whipping, and the first of many shows which my embarrassed sister would find “a bit rude”.
Gemma was a volunteer drama teacher at Arbour Hill prison along with another sexy Trinity student, Caitriona Duffy. Their classes were heavily oversubscribed but eventually had to be cancelled when one of the resident sex offenders got out of hand. I had directed a stage version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Gemma arranged for us to perform it there, as it was the least inflammatory material then in Players’s repertoire. I remember waiting nervously behind an improvised set as the prison hall filled with noisy inmates. Hoping for silence, we dimmed the lights and the whole place went bananas. An angry screw swatted me aside, slapped the lights back on and we proceeded to shout our way through the play in record time, the delighted audience baying throughout.
We did a lot of devised story theatre, principally influenced by Annie Ryan, who had come to Trinity for a year from Chicago. Over there, she had acted with John Cusack and Jeremy Piven in their company New Crime. They developed a style based on updated forms from Commedia dell’arte: grotesque make-up, expressionist delivery and stock characters. Annie still uses it with her company, The Corn Exchange, to great acclaim; I have always loved it. We did several shows together at Trinity and in the years since, after Annie married Michael West.
Michael had played the lead in Lorenzaccio and then focused his considerable talents on writing plays. He looks a lot like Beckett, whose influence was clear on A Play on Two Chairs, which Michael wrote and directed and I performed with Amanda Hogan. It was a success both in Players and at the ISDA festival, where I think we won a prize. Someone took it to Utrecht, where we spent a lively few days watching it being performed in Dutch.
Michael shared rooms with fellow scholar Lenny Abrahamson. Lenny had switched from physics to philosophy, for which he won a gold medal, but his real interest was in film. I went with Lenny, Mikel Murfi and Gary Cooke to Galway for a week to develop Lenny’s first film, Three Joes, which we shot in moody Jim Jarmusch-style in Lenny’s kitchen in Harold’s Cross. Ed Guiney produced and Stephen Rennicks wrote the score — the same team that made Lenny’s latest film Room, nominated for four Oscars in 2015. Near the end of my second year, John McCormack interrupted one of Steve’s interesting lectures on the Ontological Hysteric Theatre of Cruelty to ask: “Does anyone want to study in Paris for a year?” No one replied. Silence. I looked around, incredulous, then put my hand up: “OF COURSE!” And so for my third year, I studied drama and English in Paris, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, free of charge as an Erasmus student. Oh the glories of the prelapsarian European Union and of the days before student fees and email.
I lived initially with three Trinity girls in two rooms near Montparnasse. As we were the first Erasmus students to go from TCD to l’Universite Paris III, the lines of communication between the two institutions were a little patchy and all correspondence seemed to come through us. It was the final year of my drama degree, for which I had to attend excruciating two-hour lectures in French on Meyerhold and Grotowski and the operas of Handel. I was at sea. But no matter, for I was 21 and Paris is a moveable feast, and I confess I took advantage of the patchy lines of communication and marked myself. I had a friend, now a distinguished QC, who had perfected the idiosyncratic handwriting of the French academic. Almost all have the same careful, curling script and with this we contrived a glowing report in dubious French, ultimately awarding myself a modest low first.
During the summers, I did a lot of travelling. I hitchhiked across Eastern Europe with Juliette in 1991 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The following year we walked to Santiago de Compostela with Vanessa and some depressed Parisians. After Juliette had graduated and moved away, I hitchhiked in Ireland, to Connemara where I had been as a child with my grandmother, and to Borrisokane, where my grandfather was raised. I walked all around the north coast, from Belfast to Aran Mor island. I remember being rescued at 2am from a mountainside near Larne: a colossal rainstorm had washed my tent away and I’d made it to a road where a woman was searching for her lost bantams. She picked me up and took me to a cottage where her husband was playing a bouzouki and drinking whiskey in front of a blazing fire.
I returned to Dublin for my final year and rented a flat on the corner of Mountjoy Square in a huge Georgian townhouse with a delicate fanlight. It was freezing but wonderful, with views in three directions and a turf fire in the bedroom. I was on the top floor and below me was a sparky American, Aileen Corkery, and her boyfriend, Maurice Culligan, who played piano with The Big Geraniums. Below them was Mannix Flynn, who was talked about in hushed tones but mysteriously never appeared.
The walk home from Trinity up O’Connell Street through Parnell Square was a journey into the exotic: turf-scented twilights; pubs like the Hill 16; Tops in Pops the greengrocer; lovers’ fights outside the chip shop: “Of course I love yer! Sure don’t I buy yer chips and ride yer?” Kids were always playing on the street, one of whom, a threeyear-old, wise beyond her years, I once found crying. She had fallen over. “Are you OK?” I asked and she fixed me with a furious glare: “Ask me arse!”
My last show with Players was a 1970s disco version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I staged in the Atrium, using all its levels to delineate Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and featuring big dance numbers like Disco Inferno. For the climax, when Dante sees God, we blasted The Jacksons’ Can You Feel It and everyone got up and danced. We had rehearsed in the freezing cold of Castletown House in Celbridge because one of the writers, Ben Flynn, had use of an entire floor there. I remember we hired a double-decker and bussed everyone out there for a party after the final show. It was so cold you either had to dance or jump into bed with someone.
The Dante show consumed most of my final year, at the end of which I was hopelessly unprepared for exams. My degree was in English literature since Shakespeare, but the only book I really knew well was 14th-century Italian. Fortuitously, my first exam was on English literature in general and I remember one suggested essay title was ‘Exile’. It was my only chance. I waxed lyrical on Dante’s expulsion from Florence; his yearning for Beatrice... for Virgil... for The Jacksons... the 1970s... I couldn’t entirely remember which quotes from the show were Dante’s and which were Boney M. Surprisingly, it worked. I think the examiner actually commended me for the breadth of my reading.
I fear too little of my time was spent reading the great novels and too much trying to work out how to sound like I had. Once I had to give a paper on Middlemarch and the tutor, Anne Clune, asked me, after 20 minutes of guff, if it was George Eliot’s Middlemarch I was referring to, or somebody else’s. But I did — amazingly — read Ulysses.
I loved David Norris’s brilliant lectures on Joyce and enjoyed a whole year of his seminars on Ul- ysses without ever actually reading it. David lived near me on North Great George’s Street and I called around to him the day before the final Joyce exam, desperate and panicking. He was as kind and generous as ever and eventually said: “Well, we’re not trying to catch people out here, so I might as well give you a hint as to what might come up.” I returned home feeling considerably calmer and sufficiently inspired to open up Ulysses and read the whole book straight through. I stayed up all night in my flat, looking out over Mountjoy Square and Fitzgibbon Street, which both feature in the book, and as dawn came up over Dublin and the city bustled back to life, I read those great final words, “and yes I said yes I will Yes”. I closed the book and sauntered down Gardiner Street to the exam. It was magical.
There’s a great exchange in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, when someone asks Joyce, “So what did you do in the war?” and Joyce quips, “I wrote Ulysses”. Well, in terms of academic work, that’s what I did in four years at Trinity: I read Ulysses. In other terms, it set the course for the rest of my life. It gave me a lifelong love of Ireland; it made me decide to become an actor and it made me friends I still see and love. One in particular.
When I returned from Paris, Dominic Geraghty kept telling me about a second-year student called Catherine FitzGerald who was causing quite a stir. Beautiful, intelligent and spectacularly disdainful, she had won a scholarship and so had rooms in Rubrics, which of course made her even more attractive. A mutual friend — appropriately called Charity — introduced us in Marks Bros cafe on South Great George’s Street. Catherine thought very little of me and I thought everything of her, and little changed for 17 years, when I finally persuaded her to marry me.
Her room in Rubrics was just along from Michael West’s. Annie Ryan had returned from Chicago to be with Michael and I remember her collaring me in the corridor one morning after Catherine had sashayed past, and murmuring in her Chicago drawl, “What’s up with Lolita?” We were together for my last four months at Trinity, travelling to her family home, Glin on the Shannon, and sunbathing on the roof in Mountjoy Square with all of Dublin spread out beneath us.
Brendan Kennelly said he had given my patchy course work the benefit of considerable doubt because I had fallen in love with Catherine, whose mother he knew from Kerry. He understood my obsession and thought it should count as extenuating circumstances. Only a poet would think like that and probably only an Irish poet. Such depth of humanity: it’s what university education is all about.
‘Hoping for silence, we dimmed the lights — the whole place went bananas’ ‘She thought very little of me and I thought everything of her’