Dick Dunphy: A Profile

If Dick Dunphy is looking a little lost this week, maybe is a bit on the grumpy side, it's quite normal. The run of 'Lovers at Versailles' is over, and he's coming down from the high.

It happens every time. "For a few days after a play finishes, I have to readjust," he says. "I have to find what I'll do with myself."

At this stage of his life, Dick has probably been treading the boards longer than anyone else in Kilcullen - his first play with Kilcullen Drama Group was in 1959, which makes him possibly the only current actor in the group who played opposite some the stalwarts of a previous drama generation in Kilcullen.

"There was Bill Malone, and Julia Morris, for instance. Bill was a particularly fine comic actor, with a sense of timing like they used to talk about Jimmy O'Dea having. But Bill was also hard to play opposite, because he wasn't one to learn lines. He ad-libbed a lot, and you had to be prepared for anything ..."

When Dick first arrived in Kilcullen in the late fifties, an employee of the Dublin & District Milk Board, he stayed initially in Coleman's boarding house. And, as 'blow-ins' did in those days, he looked around to see what he could join.

"At the time there were quite a few things, the usual football clubs as well as very active tennis and billiards clubs, and there was a very busy handball alley. I had arrived in August, and one of the first things I noticed was how people would gather on the bank of the Liffey, in the field over the Jockey Style. In the afternoons and evenings they'd be sitting, and swimming, and diving from the board set up by Ken Urquhart.

"And I suppose one man who stands out in my mind most of all was Tom Berney of Sunnyside. He would dive off that board when he was maybe sixty, and he was the only guy in his generation who played handball and that kind of thing, against the rest of us who were all much younger. He was a terrific guy, there's no doubt in the world about it."

But Dick also knew that drama was a very good social outlet for a young man new on the scene, and he decided to join up. "You met women there, for a start. And I'd been in a few plays in school, and I liked it, and so in a sense I had a little bit of background in it."

His first performance was in 'Two for the Road', directed by Fr Smith. But it wasn't as if that immediately made him a star. Certainly when he came up against the man who was to become another Kilcullen Drama group legend in his own lifetime, albeit in a different discipline.

"I met Paddy Melia, and he asked me in to read for a play. In fairness, I read it very badly, and he told me: 'Don't worry about it, Dick, not everybody is cut out to be an actor'. Well, a couple of years after, he came to me saying he had just the part for me. I reminded him of what he'd said before, that he'd dismissed me out of hand, and I told him he must be badly stuck. 'I am', he said.

"He'd just had practically every man out of McTernan's pub in to read, and hadn't found one to suit."

Certainly, Paddy Melia being 'badly stuck' was Kilcullen's gain, because, over the years since, Dick Dunphy has become almost a fixture in Kilcullen drama. It is almost as if a set wouldn't be properly dressed unless he appeared on it at some part of a performance. And, fortunately, he's never got tired of it, and still isn't even at the age of sixty-seven.

"There's something about it, that you can do it at any age. After doing it all my life, it would be very hard for me to stop it. That said, though, there's no way that you can mop up lines at sixty like you can at twenty. At twenty you hardly pick up a script outside of rehearsal, but when you get on in years you have to sit down and study it at home."

He says bluntly that he does it 'for the enjoyment', and for the 'buzz' that he gets when people express their satisfaction with what he has done. And if the enjoyment went out of it, he says he'd 'be gone'. But just because it is enjoyment doesn't mean that it isn't hard work.

"I always take it seriously, and I put my heart into it. At the end of a run, my script is a rag, and if I ever fall on my face in a performance, it's not for the want of the work I put into it."

He gives to it an almost professional dedication, but he never had any wish to be a professional, not least because acting doesn't give the security of the civil service. "Only the top five or ten percent make a decent living, and I don't think that I could have accepted the insecurity ... not to mind the fact that I don't think I could have done it."

Now retired, Dick recently moved out from the Square in Kilcullen to near Cut Bush, but he remains a classic case of a 'blow-in' becoming a Kilcullenite through-and-through in his own generation.

"I couldn't leave Kilcullen now, I'd be like a stranger going back to where I came from in County Waterford. It's more than just the drama; everything you do in a place, it all comes together, gives you a kind of whole existence.

"You're here, and you have all these props. You pick them up over the years, and if any of them fall away, you become a lesser person."

But, of course, by their very nature props are also themselves held up by what they support, and Dick Dunphy is himself a great example of the many people who are the props of Kilcullen, supporting it as the kind of place that all of us here can call 'home'.

Thank you Dick, thank you all.

- Brian Byrne.