PM O’Sullivan
Clare Gibbs always had an eye.
Just for how things fit together, pattern and mosaic, the sheen of rightness. This gift led the Kilkenny native in various directions, and eventually into theatre, but first she had to be a schoolgirl. There were roads to travel in the paths of taste.
The grown woman is wry: “Drama wasn’t huge in the Presentation [School]. They did a production alright every year, and I’d go into the chorus and that. I always enjoyed it.”
“But it was certainly no thanks to any nun, my interest in costumes and design. Because I had a nun who was trying to make me sew with my right hand. I’m lefthanded.”
She continues “My mother taught me to knit. My mother taught me to sew. My grandmother, Ciss Gibbs, Daddy’s mother, found me a little hand sewing machine. I used to make dolls’ clothes, from the time I was very young, from 11 or 12 years of age.”
A lost past comes alive: “There was a woman who lived in New Street called Nonie Mahony, and she used do dressmaking. I’d say she never picked up a remnant. There was a row of cottages up from where Morrissey’s Corner Shop is now.
“You went into this tiny little doorway, down a step, and the whole floor was a sea of fabric. She said anything that was on the floor I could take. So I used to find little bits of remnants, and I’d be sewing and making with those.”
That girl became a young woman who started working, after a Marketing Diploma in Carlow RTC, for Kilkenny Design Workshops. “A summer job became a fulltime job,” Gibbs clarifies. “And when KDW opened a shop in London, in the 1980s, I went there. When that closed, I came back and went into the buying department.”
Another staging post had been reached. “I got started through the New Theatre Group,” she notes. “I went up one night to meet a friend after rehearsals in [St] Kieran’s College, late 1980s or so. They were doing their stuff, dressing the set and so on.
“I love anything to do with how things look. Something clicked. I used to do the KDW shop window and the merchandising. I said to myself: ‘God, I’d love to get involved.’ I’d never thought of going on stage. It was always backstage I was interested in.”
Yet a doubled life lay in the offing. Clare Gibbs had found her way to a prompting place: “There was just this great energy for drama in Kilkenny at that time. I did a one act play, in John Cleere’s, All My Juliets, an all female cast. I shook like a flippin’ leaf, doing it. I always remember holding a cup of tea, and all I could hear was that [rattles her teacup on saucer].”
She took heart from energy all around: “When the Watergate [Theatre] opened in the early 1990s, everything took a step up from there. Between being onstage and offstage, I was busy. I’d be sitting in the corner at rehearsals, sewing costumes.
“I was in a lot of pantos. I was with Watergate Productions. I did some musicals with Kilkenny Musical Society, kind of character parts.”
A curve flexed into an arc. As Clare gratefully recalls “For any of us that were younger, going on stage with the likes of Ger [Cody] and Mary [Cradock] and Joe Murray and Brendan Corcoran and Dónal O’Brien was tremendous. Because you learned your stagecraft, really, from them. There was just a crop of people who were there. And they stuck with drama, for the long haul.
“If you’re new in theatre, you can learn an awful lot by watching them. There’s a standard they set: ‘We want this to be the best.’ There’s a bar to at least meet. And you’re not going to be below that. And you don’t want to be the only one letting the side down.”
She elaborates “No matter how talented you are, you have to be willing to take direction. It’s not just criticism. It’s for a reason. It’s about the production. It’s a team thing.
“Even with Shirley Valentine, a solo show, it’s not about me. It’s about Mary [Cradock], as director, even more. I couldn’t do this without Mary. Not a hope. There’s always a team behind every show.”
Shirley Valentine… This experience stretched Clare Gibbs, for all her 20 plus years of doubled experience. She is honest: “You have to be half cracked, I suppose, to take on doing a one person show. One hundred per cent cracked, perhaps. It was the first solo show I ever did. An unbelievable experience… The audience were even answering me some of the time, which was a new one.
“The first performance was July last year, in The Home Rule [Club]. The response was incredible. The Home Rule is a great space, but the audience are very close to you. When I take off my glasses, I can see feck all anyway… So it was fine!”
She glosses the upcoming rerun: “Thomastown will be a different dynamic, a much different kind of space. Myself and Mary have walked the stage out there, to get a feel. It’s a bigger stage, a deeper stage, and the audience is divided from you by twelve feet or more.”
Playing this role provides an unusual challenge for any actor. Lewis Gilbert’s film of Shirley Valentine (1989) acts as a touchstone for interpretations of Willy Russell’s play. Has this factor been difficult?
Clare stays considered “Because the film is so well known, you needed to be careful you weren’t going to edit out the pieces that people will expect. They are going to remember the bit where Shirley is yelling about sex out the window. They’ll want that.”
She catches a crucial facet: “But maybe the more important point is that Shirley Valentine has aged well in a way. And I don’t know why, because the subject matter is quite tough. She’s quite downtrodden, as a lot of women were, pre 1980s. Especially in Ireland, where you had the ‘marriage ban’, where a woman had to give up her job.
“I remember my own mother when she got married. She was 26. Overnight, she is sitting at home, looking out the window. She had worked in Kilkenny County Council, but had to give up her job. That’s where she met Daddy.”
There will be a mere nine months between the two outings as Shirley Valentine. Is there anything new for which she hopes from this second spin of the play’s wheel?
More memorable wryness: “Maybe to enjoy it a bit more? Because I don’t know if I enjoyed it, last July. I mean, ‘enjoy’ is a funny word. The audience reaction was very humbling. I couldn’t get over it. People were still stopping me months later in the town, people I didn’t know.”
She remains conscious of the demands imposed by the solo form: “Usually you’re on a team. You have somebody else with you, that you are acting off, two of you together. So you are kind of like: ‘Yes!’ But when it’s just you, you’re going: ‘Oh… Oh… Oh…’
“Because even we were rehearsing last night and I stopped it. And Mary said: ‘Well done, well done.’ And I said ‘Mary, it was rubbish!,’ I felt I had to say it to her.”
The actor inclines, turns thoughtful “I don’t know what it was. I started it strange and I couldn’t wind it up. I couldn’t… It was really weird. Whether it’s an Irish thing or something: ‘We can’t take praise…’
“But it’s never going to be perfect. Because it’s live theatre and we’re all human.”
Shirley Valentine, starring Clare Gibbs, runs at Thomastown Concert Hall from March 12 to 15 at 7:30pm nightly.
Tickets available from Emily on 083 325 0617or online with Eventbrite.
