In March 1951, or perhaps it was 1952, Limerick’s cinemas all went on strike. There was a travelling theatre company going about Ireland at the time, doing Shakespeare and the odd murder mystery, and at its head was an aging, eccentric aristocrat of the theatre, the actor-manager Anew McMaster, often known simply as Mac.

For almost thirty years, McMaster had made his living bringing great plays to small places, first in England and Ireland, and then mainly just Ireland. He had been a star in Stratford, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and in London, in the 1930s, and had toured America and Australia, to acclaim. But his heart was in the small towns of Ireland and the reception his plays received there.

That March, word reached McMaster about the cinema strike. “Book Limerick!” he said. “At once!”

The company duly opened in Limerick, in a two thousand-seater cinema, on St Patrick’s Night, with ‘Othello’, McMaster’s greatest role.

They were due to start at nine pm, but people kept arriving. By 11.30, the cinema was full, and they started.

“Every one of the two thousand people in the audience was drunk,” one of the cast later recalled.

“For the first half of the play, we could not hear ourselves speak.

“We expected the audience on stage at any moment.

“I came offstage with Mac at the interval and gasped. ‘Don’t worry’, Mac said, ‘don’t worry’.

“After the interval, he began to move. When he walked onto the stage for the ‘Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm’ scene, his great body hunched, his voice low with grit, they silenced.

“He made the play his and the place his. By the time he had reached ‘It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad,’ the audience was quite still. And sober.

“I congratulated Mac. ‘Not bad’, he said, ‘was it? Not bad’.”

Limerick’s cinema strike, and the city’s drunken exposure to one of the great Shakespearian interpreters, would likely have been entirely forgotten were it not for the happy accident that one of Mac’s cast later acquired some fame as a writer. His name was Harold Pinter.

Pinter toured Ireland with McMaster’s company for two years in the early 1950s, and later wrote a short, vivid and beguiling memoir of that time, called simply ‘Mac’. (Long out of print, you can get a copy quite cheaply at www.alibris.com.)

For a coincidence of reasons, Anew McMaster has loomed large on my theatrical horizon in recent times. There was an excellent documentary on him on RTÉ last Christmas; the Gate Theatre’s 80th anniversary celebrations recalled how its two founders had met while themselves acting in McMaster’s company; earlier this year, I interviewed a veteran of one of McMaster’s last tours, Henry Woolf (you can find it on www.colinmurphy.info).

And this weekend, the All-Ireland Drama Festival comes to a close in Athlone. Writing about this during the week, I was reminded how the amateur circuit has filled the gap that was left by the demise of McMaster’s company and the other ‘fit-ups’ (as they were known, because they could fit-up their stage in a matter of moments).

The Abbey has just published a three-year review, which notes that 375,000 people attended Abbey shows in 2006-2008. The Amateur Drama Council, on the other hand, estimates that 300,000 people attend or get involved in amateur shows annually – testament to an extraordinary passion for theatre in the country, and one that is, largely, not met by professional companies. (There are exceptions: a clutch of smaller companies, like Gare St Lazare Players, and occasional ambitious tours by larger ones, such as Druid.)

Companies complain, rightly, that they aren’t funded to tour. But the obligation cuts both ways: make shows that are tourable, and touring becomes a more realistic option. The grim reality is that decades of neglect of the rural audience has fuelled an ignorance amongst the sector of both the needs and the vitality of the rural audience.

That’s not to say that touring is easy. The word that came back from the Arts Council’s recent ‘Touring Experiment’ was reportedly harsh: “it’s tough out there,” was how one actor glibly surmised it. When I briefly joined the cast of the Gate’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ on its epic, 32-county tour last autumn (itself part homage to McMaster), they agreed that the failure of companies to tour had decimated the rural audience, with the result that anybody now setting out on tour would find it more difficult to raise an audience.

But ‘Godot’ sold out in 40 venues. According to the man behind it, Michael Colgan, there had been a national failure of imagination with regard to touring: think big, he suggested, and you’ll find your audience.

Tomorrow night, in the ballroom of the Radisson, one of nine amateur groups will be announced this year’s All-Ireland winner; there will likely be bonfires lit for them on their return to their home town. The amateur movement keeps a passion for drama burning brightly across Ireland; but the professionals should hold a torch for it as well.

Written for my weekly column in the Irish Independent’s Saturday ‘Review’, May 2009