View from the Green Room: A night in Imelda May’s sitting room
Imelda May
"The last time I was here in the Theatre Royal, I was in a bed and playing Kathleen Behan; now I’m at home in my sitting room," announced Imelda May, as she sauntered onstage in a flowing full-length dress on the Mall.
Either way, it’s the intimate, folksy way Imelda treats her audiences. Like the glass of Merlot in her hand, Imelda is warm, friendly, gossipy, with a keen intelligence and a razor-sharp line in easy banter.
She’s got the audience in the palm of her hand within seconds as everyone feels they’ve been invited into her sitting room for a chat with a friend. Her easy banter with the house is infectious.
"Anyone here from the Liberties?...anyone from another country?...you’se are welcome… requests," she asks, and promises to include as many of them as she can. And she does!
There are more instruments on show in her sitting room than you would find down in John Palmer’s music supermarket in George’s St. A couple of clocks give a nod to past times and memories of childhood and family.
There’s a touching sincerity about everything she mentions that touches on family that everyone can easily identify with. A loving father who was a painter by trade but an artist and a dancer by choice is movingly described in a poem. The love of an adoring mother who spoke to her daughter with the lyricism of a poet is recreated in my own favourite of the night, in ‘Meet you at the Moon’, a timeless and moving classic that holds out the promise of the never-ending story of a mother’s love.
Forget the nostalgia of ‘Dublin in the rare auld times’ and listen to the heartbreak of Seán Dempsey from Pimlico, a man who lost everything – home, trade and, above all, the love of his life that left him desolate for a lifetime.
"I want to strip songs back to where they came from, what they said when they were born, to their core," explains Imelda.
‘Sweet Sixteen’ carries all the age-long reassurance from James Thornton’s 1898 ballad that true love never dies even when youth and beauty fade and life gets in the way.
A very slow Raglan Road goes right back to the beginning of the heartache of a middle-aged poet’s infatuation with the strikingly beautiful and incredibly intelligent Hilda Moriarty, a medical student from Kerry. Hilda never saw Paddy Kavanagh as anything more than a friend and her parents – ‘the Queen of Hearts still making tarts’ – were less than impressed with the penniless poet.
The young doctor went on to marry Donagh O’Malley, a chap with film star looks who subsequently became the Minister for Education, who introduced free education and university grants that brought profound social change to Ireland in the twentieth century. Hard to compete with that now.
Nevertheless, Kavanagh was the genius who immortalised Hilda in verse and "gave her poems to say".
Imelda May doesn’t simply deliver these ballads; she enters them, inhabits their histories and becomes the desolate figures they frequently portray. Reflecting in her sitting room, she’s got the time to reflect on the pivotal figures, not only of her songs, but of friends and relations from her own life experience… "I called this tour Raised on Songs and Stories because I was raised on songs and stories, and you’d be in the middle of the family, and the singing song would start and you’d be there till 3 or 4 in the morning… you’d fall asleep on a chair, and someone would just throw their coat over you – if you were lucky."
Imelda May is a gifted songstress who makes her unique Irish exploration of life a universal experience.
