There’s no business like show business...just ask Bertie

ASK an actor about the difference between a Monday night audience and a Saturday night audience.

Then stand well back while they rant about the witty line that gets a titter from Monday-nighters as opposed to a full-throated roar of laughter from theatre-goers at the end of the week.

Monday-nighters take a neutral-to-negative, "Prove it" stance. Saturday-nighters are positive, take the point as already proven and just want to celebrate the wonders of the play, the performance and their perceptiveness about both.

Losing the Swiss match transformed the Fianna Fail Ard-Fheis from a Saturday night audience into something close to a Monday-night crowd. If the Taoiseach, in his keynote address, had opened a vein, the response of those present would have been "Yeah, he does a good vein-opening, but we've seen veins opened before."

When party faithful have taken time out of an already attenuated Ard-Fheis to catch a sporting disaster on TV, they're not going to be that keen to deliver what Bunny Carr once described as 'a standing ovulation.'

Politics has a lot in common with theatre. Each creates in its audience a deepened understanding of disregarded truths. Each can entertain, enlighten, educate, motivate, inform and transform.

Inevitably, both fall back on traditional devices.

Jackie Healy-Rae dressed up as a convict for a photo-opportunity is part of a noble tradition that includes Shakespeare's great 'wise fools' who allow us to ridicule their peasant pranks and costumes while sliding the occasional wise saw under the closed door of our consciousness.

Jackie Healy-Rae always knows what he's at, when he does showbiz. The Conservative Leader, Ian Duncan Smith does not, as his party conference speech this week painfully demonstrated.

At first glance, what he did was showbiz personified. He belted the table in front of him with a clenched fist. He bellowed the name of the figure Tony Blair he wanted the audience to boo.

He dropped his voice to a whisper when he talked about the anger of the British people. Cross a fire-fighter with a referee and you couldn't get more bells and whistles.

The standing ovulations started early and never stopped. Up and down like yo-yos went those assembled Tories, which was impressive, given their average age. Nineteen standing ovulations, he got, including one at the end that lasted twelve minutes on the clapometer.

Now, I ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen, in the light of such a performance, is this man a hit or a miss? Speak freely.

Be unafraid. What's that you say? He's a miss? Bloody right, he's a miss. He is such a miss, he may, in this particular speech, have provided the world with the quintessential example of two plus two making three. Or less.

The problem with the speech was that it ignored the most obvious lesson of theatre: volume does not persuade. Passion must come from within. It cannot be pasted on from the outside in cleverly-crafted short sentences.

Simplistic coaches and image-builders always reach for a set of external signs which, applied, they trust to render the unappealing appealing.

Great coaching and image-building are much tougher. They require mining within the man or woman to locate the burning core, assuming they have a burning core. If they don't, all the rhetoric in the world will not make a leader out of them.

Yearning towards turbo-charged rhetoric is what dumped Ian Duncan Smith in the soup this week. Those who were at the conference thought his speech was OK. Those who watched it on TV thought it was weird, and said so in one newspaper column after another.

It's also what made many people miss, in Bertie Ahern, the quiet steely concentration on keeping the show running which has always been his burning core.The first time I saw this aspect of Bertie Ahern was at a candidate briefing before some election.

The air was filled with discontent, mutual mistrust and references to past electoral infighting. The Leader listened in silence. Then he hauled off and told them to get over it and focus on what they had to do. Day, date and activity. No sympathy. No hesitations. No imprecision. He talked perfect prose. He was as direct as Patton.

FOR the first time, I felt I had a handle on the Ahern phenomenon. This man isn't driven by greed or power or position or ideology or crookedness or the desire for media coverage or a place in history. The burning core of his politics is the thrill of making the political production work.

Like many theatrical producers, he listens with half an ear to one of his divas bitching about another: all that matters is the curtain going up each night. He listens with half an ear, too, to the media questions about his own dropping popularity.

The personal popularity of a theatrical producer is irrelevant. It may suit the marketing team to brand him and put him front of house, but if the public get bored by this auteur approach, the next production can be marketed some other way.

Similarly, Bertie Ahern will allow his image to be used to sell the party when he's wildly popular, or abandoned when he's less popular. The issue of personal vanity or hurt simply doesn't arise. The show must go on. Until 2007, the show must go on.

The Taoiseach yesterday notified the nation that he's going to go into the record books for length of run. He is aiming to be the governmental equivalent of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest-running production in the West End.

He will take any hassle, absorb any humiliation in the interests of keeping his show on the road. Media can shake their gory locks about the upcoming local and European elections, but if the Taoiseach talks in his sleep, the date he murmurs isn't 2004 but 2007.

I'm betting he has one of those clocks that projects the time in red light onto the ceiling, and that he has adapted it so the numerals read 2007.

Actors in a long-running play find concentration a major problem. When you have to say the same thing six nights a week to the same people in the same place, you can find yourself doing it on auto-pilot and having difficulty injecting feeling into it.

Long-running administrations pose parallel problems, except that their problems tend to centre on media. Around the mid-point of such an administration, a series of mutually contagious problems begin.

Ministers make mistakes. Opinion polls disimprove. Media leap on a whiff of dissension or scandal as if it was the Gunpowder Plot. In response, the administration's PR people begin taking names of Media Hacks who Can't be Trusted.

The Opposition bang the table with clenched fists. Some grassroot says the Government is not getting out the good news stories.

The PR people boil with rage and produce even more speeches with more lists of achievements and expenditure. The general public and media change channels because who wants to hear a bus-time-table of random boasts?

All of which is currently happening to the Coalition. And not one bit of it is going to distract the Taoiseach/producer from his concentrated determination to get the production on stage every night until the theatre finally goes dark. Sometime in 2007.