From an early age I was stage struck.
Isn’t every child?

I remember making up, costuming and acting in plays of our own devising from an early age with my Daly cousins.
My first real stage experience came from the Cork Ballet Company.
I was given tiny parts in two of their large City Hall productions at around the age of eleven.
I was a page accompanying the prince in Giselle, as far as I remember I had to walk across the stage and knock at the door of Giselle’s house.
To hear any of that music to this day still gives me collywobbles.
Giselle was the beautiful dancer Domini Callaghan, she was kind to a nervous 11 year old boy,
I was struck.
In the same season I was then a street child in a marvellous production of Petruchka, the smell of the greasepaint (numbers 5 and 9 applied with care) and the roar of the crowd totally captivated me.
My next experiences happened in school.
Christians Brothers College in Cork doesn’t have many fond memories for me but their annual Christmas productions of Gilbert and Sullivan Operas were my happiest times there.
The first production I was involved in there was Patience, as a member of the chorus of “Love Sick Maidens”.
It perhaps should be explained that in the early sixties it wasn’t reckoned to be sexually deviant to dress pre pubertal boys up in dresses as the female chorus. The reason being that their voices had yet to break and they could sing the soprano and alto roles.
I was as I said a mere member of the chorus, but in the classic Broadway tradition one of the leads, “The Lady Saphir” got laryngitis the day before we opened. I, with my relatively vast theatrical experience, was plucked from the chorus to prefect the role in 48 hours.
It was established fairly early on that where as I could manage the solos OK someone else would have to sing the harmonies from the wings during the part songs while I mimed the words.
I have never managed to avoid singing the melody when singing harmonies and as Saphir was the alto part I was lost.
Otherwise though I must have acquitted myself well because the following year when about 13 I was given the lead role in “The Yeoman of The Guard”
As Phoebe I opened the opera singing a solo, being “discovered”seated at a spinning wheel.
I was in my element.
Then puberty came, my voice broke and my singing career was over.
At much the same time I realised that to become any good at ballet it would require a gruelling round of classes which I was much too lazy to undergo so my ailing theatrical career was rescued by “The Loft”
The Loft was quite a marvellous theatrical institution.
The practices took place in an old loft over a sweet factory in Mulgrave Road in Cork.
Founded by the legendary Fr. O Flynn the Loft had trained many Abbey and even some Hollywood actors in its time.
What it did leave me with is a lifetime love of Shakespeare.
I got lots of minor parts from the Loft over the years, the often involved carrying a spear, or a message.
My Loft highlight came when I was playing the flamboyant but distinctly minor character of Osric in a production of Hamlet, a part of no more than 4 or 5 lines but a bit of business with a hat. In the review in the Examiner the following day drama critic Mary Leland praised my part as a “delightful cameo”.
The fact that I can remember the words still today tells all!

The next, and final part of my acting career happened while I was at university.
I did various parts in various plays while at UCC, and even for a heady moment played an “ ingenu” in a Feydeau farce produced by the semi professional Everyman theatre company.

The highlight of my career, and my virtual swan song was in a Becket play, “ Act without Words”.
A young producer in UCC, acknowledging my previous dancing experience, decided to produce this one act solo mime piece by Becket.
It is a fairly depressing piece about a man, on his uppers, having even the consolation of suicide taken from him.
There is a moment where a bottle of water, labelled “Water” is lowered from the flies only to be whisked away just as my fingers closed on it.
The play was a success and received good notices and that would have been that had not the Universities Drama Festival of Irish Language Plays been hosted that year in Cork.
Discovering that we were technically eligible to enter, our single word in English being the “Water” label, we changed the label to “Uisce” ,changed the title to Gniomh gan Focail, and entered.

My “Oscars” moment was at the adjucation of the festival when the adjucator , the actor Donal Farmer, announced that the award for best actor –An tAisteoir is fearr- went to, Mairtin O Duibhir agus Gniomh Gan Focail.
This was definitely a moment of adrenalin intoxication.

Where as I did a few more bits and pieces on the stage after that, nothing lived up to that moment and I soon abandoned my notions of stardom.
Mind you there are a few traces of the old Ham still in my make up.
Pat Murray, a well known set designer and a one time member of the Arts Council took one look around my restaurant when in for dinner and said;
“My God Martin, this place is so like a theatre set!”

My daughter Dee, God love her, seems to have inherited the theatrical gene but unlike her father, her interest is not so much in the limelight, but in the design and production side.
She went also to UCC where she did a degree in Theatre and English.
The head of the drama department was an old friend of mine and I kept saying to Dee “Did you tell him who you were?”
“Dad”, she used to say “I will do this on my own”
Her spirit finally weakened when the same lecturer told the story in class one day about Becket, and how Act without Words became Gniomh Gan Focail.
At that stage she felt she had no choice but to tell him that he was talking about her father!