Oh, Mandy

Every now and then I fall apart, but sometimes in a good way.

And not just me. I don’t think anybody came out from the Playhouse in Derry a couple of Saturday nights ago un-gobsmacked by Amanda Doherty.
It was the sort of performance people feel compelled to stand around in the rain afterwards talking about.
Arnold Wesker’s Annie Wobbler - three semi-detached one-act, one-woman performances - was a daring project for a woman not yet 20 to take on.
Wesker was already out of fashion when he wrote the piece in the early 1980s. 20 years earlier, his great trilogy – Roots, Chicken Soup With Barley and I’m Talking About Jerusalem – had earned him high critical acclaim and popular success. So, for theatre-goers of a certain age – well, my age – he’s a name to conjure with, albeit a name from the past. But I was struck at the Playhouse by the number of people – theatre-goers every one, after all – who’d never heard of him
So Ms. Doherty was setting herself up for a comedown. However it worked out, she’d have deserved gold for brass neckery. What she achieved in the event was a soaring success.
She has the balance and poise of a ballet dancer, using every cubic inch of the stage, capering onto chairs on tiptoe like the possibility she might collapse in a tangle of limbs has never occurred to her, which it probably hasn’t, remarkable vocal range, harsh cackle to silky sigh, able to conjure up an emotion with a wave of a hand or convey a mood-change with a facial twitch. She can do soft-and-dreamy, then speak rat-a-tat with the articulation of a scat-singer. Shifts from gawky to gorgeous with a sway of her hip. She’s great.
Annie Wobbler isn’t a great piece, though. It’s never more than the sum of its parts, and I’m not sure they add up to much. Only the first of the plays, featuring the title character, an illiterate, articulate working woman who takes no chances – synagogue on Saturdays, church on Sunday – but is achingly aware of the limits on her life, suggests a depth of experience which an audience might be moved by.
The second play focuses on another version of Annie – thoroughly modern, Cambridge-educated Anna, living in contradiction, aware that she’s entitled to feel sure of herself but knowing, too, that she’s dependent on brains and black underwear.
The third features best-selling novelist Annabella as she interrogates herself in three overlapping, perhaps imagined, television interviews, trying to work out whether there’s anything to her at all other than seeking revenge on life through pursuit of money and power and being the cynosure of all eyes when she walks into a room.
All three Annies are vulnerable, trapped and uncertain, yet brave, resourceful and zesty. If the piece is about anything, it’s the way life, perhaps women’s life especially, can never make up its mind whether to summon up sunshine or bring down the deluge. Something like that. I think. As novelist Annabella mordantly observes, writers don’t do messages, that’s Western Union.
But, anyway, the play was not the thing. What made the experience vibrate like a tuning fork in the mind even now was Ms. Doherty. She might be the future.

Pride Week in Derry prompted me to recall that, in the beginning, it wasn’t “the gay movement,” but the “gay liberation movement.”
It erupted from a riot in New York in 1969 when cops raiding the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street were forced to flee in bewilderment as customers, instead of coming quietly as usual, fought back with bottles, sticks and paving stones.
The story is told, and it might even be true (I never miss an opportunity to tell it, anyway) that a rookie cop back at the station, fresh in from Mayo, was transfixed by a panicky message crackling across the radio: “Send reinforcements, we’re being attacked by fairies.”
By the time the fiery godmothers of Christopher Street had finished, the perspective of gays on America and America on gays had been transformed utterly.
One of the first manifestations of the movement on this side of the ocean was the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, named to produce the acronym “CHE.”
As I recall it, almost all gay activists saw themselves as part of a wave of resistance to oppression of all kinds, and worked with the movement against the war in Vietnam, the black movement, the women’s movement.
In time, some moved away from struggle in association with others, adopting a strategy of living as far as practicable outside straight society, or of winning acceptance and a place within the world as it was. The biggest gay organisation in these islands, Stonewall, has sponsored a “workplace conference,” on the theme: “How building an inclusive environment is good for business,” with guest speakers from the Royal Navy, IBM and Barclays Bank.
I preferred the old ways of “Revolution is only a kiss away” and “Sodom today, Gomorrah the world,” neither of which would go down a bundle with Barclays.
Still, much has changed, and not least in Ireland. Gordon Brown felt he had to get married to enhance his chances of becoming PM. But Bertie Ahern got no political grief for living with Celia Larkin.
Ron Davies was forced out of Blair’s government after being mugged as he dallied on a stretch of Clapham Common where gays meet for sex. But Emmet Stagg emerged unscathed from his encounter in Phoenix Park.
The changes have been easier to chart in the South than in the North. But, palpably, there is a similar process under way. Free Derry Wall had been painted unshocking pink. I spoke at the opening of Pride, a most civilised affair in the City Hotel – classical violinist, tasty little titbits which I believe are called canapés, David McCartney in a good suit – along with Executive Minister Margaret Richie and deputy mayor Patricia Logue. The Rev. Browne of the Free Ps pulled fewer than 20 him-singers – not a woman among them: interesting, that – to his protest outside.
Much done, then. Much more to do. As soon as we’re done shimmying at Rock for Pride.

Two reasons we didn’t make it to Slane.
One, Terry O’Neill and myself decided we’d take it as an insult and boycott the gig if personal invites and double-laminates didn’t arrive from Lord Henry without us having to ask, which they didn’t.
Two, after Glasgowbury, the Stones were bound to be a let-down. Mantic, Duke Special, Fighting With Wire, Oppenheimer, the Delawares, Desert Hearts, Superjiminez, And So I Watch You From Afar, Mojo Fury, Paddy Nash, Cat Malojian and many, many more... All at Eagle’s Rock, nestling in the Sperrins, the hills rising all around in rolls of rumpled velvet.
More on this next issue. Plus a full rundown on this year’s Gasyard Feile Battle of the Bands, which we gave to Organised Confusion for tightness and teenagery and then began agonising that it might have been Mantic. Or David Dryden’s new band. Or any of the six that had made it through to the final.
Around here, this is the golden age. So remember, people. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.