The highlight of my acting 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!