Reaping the Whirlwind

Higgins, understandably enough, is virtually unknown to Americans, most of whom can?t reasonably be expected to know the game at which he excelled.
The relatively few exceptions will be members of the audiences for ?Hurricane,? the riveting one-actor play written and performed by a charismatic actor from Belfast named Richard Dormer.
Dormer made his New York debut in the recently completed run of ?Hurricane? at Theater B, the mid-sized of the three new auditoriums at 59 East 59th Street in Manhattan.
If Dormer hasn?t performed in the city before, he has, on two occasions, played in the vicinity. He appeared in a Belfast-based play, Mojo Mickybo,? as part of an arts festival at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Shortly thereafter, he played in Stamford, Conn., playing ?Gar Private,? the hero?s ?invisible? alter ego in Brian Friel?s ?Philadelphia, Here I Come? in a production by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, which did a limited American tour.
Born in County Armagh, Dormer and his family moved to Lisburn, in what the actor refers to as ?greater Belfast.? At 17, he left Belfast and went to London, enrolling at RADA, the acronym for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, having won a three-year scholarship.
?When that ended,? he recalled, ?I went straight into a production of ?Billy Budd? at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield.? Playing Herman Melville?s young hero marked the first occasion on which the eager Northerner actually got paid for acting.
The jobs kept coming, but one of those nearly put an end to Dormer?s career.
?I was in an original play in London?s West End,? he said. ?It was Jonathan Harvey?s ?Beautiful Thing,? and it was very successful, but I wasn?t happy. I was working for six months in a play I didn?t like very much, because I wasn?t challenging myself in it, and I wasn?t growing. So I stopped acting for three or four years because I wasn?t fulfilled. If that was success, I didn?t want it.?
Dormer relocated to Dublin and started writing. ?I did two film scripts,? he recalled, ?and one of them nearly got done, with Gabriel Byrne as producer-director. It was called ?The Driftwood Tree.? ?
The film never got made, but it gave Dormer confidence as a writer, confidence he?d definitely need when the time came to approach a project as difficult as ?Hurricane.?
Like many Belfast people, Dormer had long had an awareness of Alex Higgins. ?He?s kind of a legend,? the actor said, ?all through Ireland and the United Kingdom. He?s really something of a hero.?
Dormer is now 34, but when he was a teenager, people kept comparing him to Higgins. ?Particularly when I was in drama school, people would tell me I looked like a very young Alex Higgins, and that, if anyone ever made a film about him, I should try to get it,? he said.
Higgins was a well-known individual, and Dormer followed his progress in the newspapers. ?His downfall,? he said, ?was quite well documented.?
From 1972, when he won snooker?s world championship, Higgins was a public figure, and he stayed in the public eye until the late 1980s. He was considered a kind of rock ?n? roll figure, a bad boy of snooker, and after a certain point, his fortunes took a severe downward turn.
In a way, ?Hurricane? germinated because of a photograph Dormer saw in a newspaper. ?It was when the actor Oliver Reed died,? he said. ?There was a picture of Alex standing beside his grave, and he looked completely dead. He looked like a skeleton made out of sticks or stones. He was ill at the time, since it was only a few months after he?d been operated on for throat cancer. I thought about how much I?d like to tell that man?s story, because I felt sure that he was about to disappear.
?I started asking around Belfast,? Dormer continued, ?if people knew Higgins, or even if they knew where he lived. I didn?t make much progress, because even when people recalled seeing him here and there, they?d unfailingly tell me that I?d never make any progress with him, because he was impossible to talk to.?
In addition to being ill, Higgins, who is still living, was, in fact, severely depressed.
Dormer had begun researching Higgins?s story, but he hadn?t actually written anything. ?I found a biography in the library in Belfast,? he said. It was called ?Alex Through the Looking Glass,? and it had been published in 1986.?
At one point, Dormer, who had returned to Belfast and started acting again, principally at the Lyric Theatre, went down to Dublin to audition for a small part in Martin Scorsese?s movie ?Gangs of New York.? He didn?t get the job, but he did get his first encounter with Alex Higgins.
?I was having a pint at the bar in Connolly Station in Dublin and chatting with an actor friend,? he said. ?When I told him I was considering writing about Higgins, he elbowed me and pointed at a man sitting next to us.?
It was Higgins, of course. ?I said, ?I?d love to buy you the pint you just ordered and talk with you a bit,? ? Dormer recalled.
Higgins, who seemed fragile and was struggling with a set of golf clubs, told Dormer that if he?d help him onto the train, they could talk on the way to Belfast.
On the train, Higgins got it into his mind that they should exchange jackets. When Dormer declined, Higgins turned on his heel and stalked away down the train corridor.
The actor feared that the encounter had been a disaster, but after about 30 minutes, Higgins reappeared in the compartment doorway, carrying a bottle of beer, which he put down beside Dormer.
?He said, ?No hard feelings, son,? ? Dormer recalled.? And then he said, ?You remind me of when I was your age,? and he left.?
Dormer remembered thinking ?This man?s still got it,? and he returned to his writing project with renewed energy.
Dormer?s wife, the Cork-born Rachel O?Riordan, directed ?Hurricane,? which takes its title from the nickname attached to Higgins during the period of his greatest fame.
Originally, ?Hurricane? was supposed to be a film, but it was O?Riordan who thought it might work onstage, with a movie version eventually following, with luck.
And the show has, in fact, worked onstage, right from the very beginning, from its first performance on Oct. 12, 2002, and it?s provided Alex Higgins with a new life.
?Off the back of the play, the newspapers are interested in him again, and he?s playing exhibitions all around the U.K., and he?s going off to Canada at some point,? Dormer said. ?For 20 years, his career and his life had collapsed. Now he?s signing autographs again.?