Ungainly, perhaps, but certainly not inaccurate, since the event was conceived as a benefit for the National Theatre of Ireland, better known as the Abbey, as it enters its second century of more or less continual operation in Dublin and on tour, with time out for the celebrated fire the organization suffered in 1951.
The major names enlisted for the evening?s performance segments included Brian Dennehy, Fionnula Flanagan, Donal Donnelly, and, acting as master of ceremonies, a gracefully relaxed Gabriel Byrne, with an appealingly unfamiliar three-man singing group, the Celtic Tenors, rounding out the rich and rewarding evening in the ?special guests? slot.
After brief, effective opening remarks from, among others, the committee?s co-chairpersons, the audience, seated in the Metropolitan Club?s elegantly baroque dining hall, was treated to a brief, eloquent film recalling the glories of the Abbey?s first century.
The screen was flooded with rapid images of some of the vanished greats of Ireland?s National Theatre, among them Sara Allgood, Cyril Cusack, Donal McCann Jack Macgowran, Siobhan McKenna, John B. Keane, Sean O?Casey, J.M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, Stewart Parker, Arthur Shields, and, of course, the Abbey?s founders, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory.
Actors, writers and directors still with us and visible in the course of the beautifully produced 12-minute film included John Kavanaugh, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Liam Neeson, Sinead Cusack, Niall Toibin, Fiona Shaw, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness, Seamus Heaney, Peter Sheridan, Marina Carr, and more recent Abbey arrivals such as Eugene O?Brien, poet Paula Meehan and journalist Stuart Carolan.
Compilation films such as this one can easily touch the heart merely by the presentation of disappeared names and faces, but there was something deeper and more resonant about the Abbey version, possibly as a result of the towering achievements racked up by so many of these people.
The brief film presentation served as an ideal introduction to the live performances that were to follow. Host Byrne, tieless and seeming uncharacteristically at ease, repeated the frequently heard comment that the Abbey endures as ?the heartbeat of the nation.? Actress Fionnula Flanagan, who has journeyed from her Los Angeles home on numerous occasions to read Molly Bloom?s soliloquy at the annual Bloomsday celebrations produced by Symphony Space, led off with a truncated, slightly bowdlerized, but nevertheless powerful and moving version of the same familiar section of James Joyce?s immortal ?Ulysses.?
Brian Dennehy, fresh from his triumph as James Tyrone in this past season?s hit revival of Eugene O?Neill?s ?Long Day?s Journey into Night,? recalled the days, a decade ago, when he played Hickey, the doomed salesman in the same author?s ?The Iceman Cometh,? in Dublin with the same Irish-American director, Robert Falls.
Milo O?Shea provided a sprightly excerpt from Sean O?Casey?s ?The Shadow of a Gunman,? delivering it with the wry wit that has, for decades, been something of an O?Shea trademark.
On balance, perhaps the most resonant and most brilliantly rendered performance fragment came from Donal Donnelly, who delivered one of the best portions of the celebrated one-actor show, ?My Astonishing Self,? in which he played George Bernard Shaw.
The segment the actor chose to perform repeated the occasion on which the British Broadcasting Company visited Shaw at his home in Ayot St. Lawrence for the only television appearance the Dublin-born playwright ever made.
The reason for the BBC visit to GBS was that he had just celebrated his 90th birthday. The speech the writer made that day is a rare slice of Shaw, and Donnelly has performed it with brilliance on literally hundreds of occasions, but probably never to greater effect than met him on this night.
The actor?s advancing age combined with a certain visible diminution in mobility somehow made his rendering of this particular moment in the Irish writer?s life even deeper and more moving than it had seemed in the past. Donnelly was rewarded with an energetic ovation from his hearers and he deserved it totally.
The Abbey?s current artistic director, Ben Barnes, made a point in his brief, heartfelt speech of mentioning the late actress Pauline Flanagan, who died in June of this year. She had appeared at the Abbey only a couple of seasons ago in playwright Tom Murphy?s eloquent, difficult play ?Bailegangaire,? scoring a great personal triumph in a taxing role she repeated only last season at New York?s Irish Repertory Theatre.
Closing out the beautifully organized evening were the Celtic Tenors, namely Matthew Gilsenan, Niall Morris and James Nelson, who performed an especially lyrical version of ?The Fields of Athenry,? a number they have recorded on their ?Irish Album.?
Another song the Celtic Tenors have recorded and included on both of the albums they have released to date is Phil Coulter?s lovely and evocative ?The Town I Loved So Well.? That they didn?t perform the number at the Metropolitan Club was something of a pity, since the composer was in the audience, as was Academy award-winning actress Estelle Parsons.
Fundraisers come and fundraisers go, star-studded or otherwise, and while a few of them are enjoyable, most are tedious in the extreme. The Abbeyonehundred effort on behalf of the National Theatre of Ireland?s forthcoming second century was quite something else again.
Always engrossing and frequently extremely moving this deeply sincere tribute to the Abbey Theatre showed, in itself, some of the creative mettle that has despite a few setbacks, made the elegant old institution a loved and honored entity for a full century, with a successful second hundred years almost certainly in the offing.