The DVD of acclaimed Cork performer Paddy Comerford's first solo show will ensure that his legendary stories are not lost. And it might even pass as a CV, he tells MARY LELAND.
PADDY COMERFORD was, as an envious relative once claimed, “reared on velvet”. Even Comerford himself acknowledges the truth of this: “To this day I can’t take a drink of milk except from a glass.” Still, at 79, this professional salesman and semi-professional actor – and one of Cork’s most admired personalities – has just gone through his first solo production with a degree of trepidation which seemed to belie his long career in what he calls “show business”. While he says that this nervousness was the result, “strange as it seems”, of his preference for avoiding the limelight, it is also true that it’s an ingredient which adds immeasurably to one of his most endearing portrayals, that of “Uncle Peter”, a character of palsied crabbiness based on a habitué of Dunlea’s pub in Cork. Quivering with complaint, he has an O’Casey-like pathos, to which is added a quirky mystification at the way things have turned out, a mystification that is all Comerford’s own.
“I’m not telling jokes,” he says. “I couldn’t be a stand-up comedian and there’s always a narrative to what I have to say, and I believe in the character I’m telling you about. And when Pat Talbot suggested we might do this kind of production, a one-man show at the Everyman, I said he must be joking. But Anthony Dinan has told me that some of my stories are like legends and that it would be a shame for them to be lost, more or less, when I go myself. He said that everyone in Cork has a CV except Paddy Comerford, so when Pat Talbot said the theatre would make a DVD of the show I thought that might pass as my CV.”
Comerford ends this account on an upward, inquiring note: his testimonial DVD might even pass as a more complete record of his peers than their own more predictable CVs. His performance in the Make 'Em Laughrevue at the Everyman Palace last year recalled many of those peers as they passed through his acting life. Offered from the relaxed, cabaret-style vantage-point of a high chair on an empty stage, each anecdote was quickened by detail and by the economical build-up of context, storytelling skills which, when asked about them, he can't define. He can't describe what he does, which is not an uncommon predicament for actors of intuitive creativity (and, after all, it had been a few years since Comerford had held the stage).
After working with Comerford for nearly 40 years and now directing his solo show, Michael Twomey describes Comerford's talent for comedy as both natural and unique. But Twomey also recalls the actor's other qualities, expressed in, for example, a memorable performance in Guys and Dolls, directed by Jimmy Belchamber at Cork Opera House. Comerford also played the Straw Man in The Wizard of Oz, and there were parts in several plays by John B Keane and with the Cork Group Theatre (where Comerford's work with James N Healy led to Cork Operatic Society and Gilbert and Sullivan productions). Later roles included Joxer in Juno and the Paycock, directed by Pat Talbot for the Everyman. All this work showed his command of the stage, his acute ear for accent and nuance, and his physical elegance. As a single performer, however, he is so grounded in his own observations and experiences that, while his material remains essentially local, his appeal can reach beyond the limits of both generation and geography.
His personal geography begins at Rock Terrace on the North Mall in Cork, where he was born to Mary and James Comerford in 1930.
“Somehow, when I was two years of age, I got out of the house and tried to climb the 143 steps between Rock Terrace and Blarney Street in order to get to my grandmother at Ballymacthomas,” he says. “I was found on my way by my cousin, Ignatius Comerford, then about 12 or 13. His own mother had died very young, and in the way of those days the children were farmed out among relatives, with Ignatius going to Ballymacthomas. So he carried me on up there and I stayed there for the next 21 years.”
But didn’t his mother mind? “No, she was a very quiet woman. And she had had four children in about three and a half years.”
Well, didn’t he mind? “No, I was brought home every day, but I was reared by my grandmother and two maiden aunts, and I was absolutely spoiled. I was brought up in a sense as somebody special. As they say, I was reared on velvet.”
FOILED IN HIS schoolboy plans to run away to sea when his co-conspirator at the North Monastery was rejected by the Royal Navy, Comerford was apprenticed to the shoe department at Grant's department store and, when Grant's closed, joined the advertising staff at the Cork(now Irish) Examiner. (He later took up sailing, has map-reading as a major hobby and has been closely involved with the Ballycotton lifeboat service.)
His 25-year marriage to Ann Madden ended when she died after suffering the effects of a stroke for the last six years of her life. Her loss has marked Comerford, and he goes to her grave at Ringaskiddy every day.
As a Comerford on the Cork stage, his name conjures the enduring public affection earned by his rescuer on the Rock Terrace steps. Ignatius Comerford was another actor with a genius for comedy as well as stylish characterisation. After he was struck down by a sudden disabling illness, his loss to the local theatre was like a death in the civic family.
“He often performed as the Dame in the Opera House pantos and he had a gift for closeness, for intimacy, which drew the audiences,” Paddy Comerford says. “People loved him, they still talk about him.”
But Comerford doesn’t think that his cousin influenced his own stage career, although Ignatius encouraged him and, even when unable to speak, would go back after a show and gesture his approval. In another gesture, perhaps of resignation or acceptance, he gave Paddy his make-up box, which is now part of Cork Public Museum’s exhibition on the history of theatre in the county.
The critical neglect of amateur and semi-amateur productions, once the lifeblood of provincial theatre, has imposed an unchallenged obscurity on many players of quality. If Dublin had its Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter, for example, Cork has Paddy Comerford and his long-time pantomime and revue colleague, Billa O’Connell. Thin Paddy and Round Billa, both chewing the script, made a pairing hard to beat.
"We always shared the one dressing room," says O'Connell. "There were 21 years of Summer Revelsand Paddy maintains that we did 32 pantomimes. We were never competing against one another – it was a partnership, not a rivalry . . . Paddy could produce that instant repartee, he was quickfire, he could strike the moment, he could catch it."
Those were the days when comedy didn't depend on four-letter words, days when pantomimes opened on St Stephen's Day. Different times, says O'Connell, times of Comerford as an Ugly Sister "with a face like a bag of chisels", or of the blast they had appearing together on The Late Late Show. Different times, different people, different stories, many of which Paddy Comerford recaptured in his Everyman production.
" Just Paddy," he wonders nervously. "It's not been a very colourful life, I suppose."
Again there is the quirk in the question, but that’s just Paddy Comerford.
A DVD of Just Paddylive at the Everyman will be available from September, produced by Everyman Palace Theatre and Thomas Crosbie Holdings
