Paraic Cullen on Silver Stars, in conversation with Seamus Cashman

It all began with Sean Millar, the songwriter. On a long drive, one night, from Galway to Dublin, his friend Aidan decided to tell Sean his life story, and naturally a variety of things came up in that three-or-four-hour-long conversation. Sean, who is a famous singer and songwriter, was so moved by it that he wrote a song based on Aidan’s experience. He brought it to Dominic Campbell of the Bealtaine festival, identifying that this song told a lost story about gay men in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Dominic suggested composing some more songs about other people’s experiences.

Sean developed six songs. As Dominic had suggested, he began to shape the idea of using the songs for a dramatic performance. And so it became what is now ‘Silver Stars’, a documentary song-cycle. All the songs, every word and every song, came from somebody’s testimony; there isn’t an invented word in it. Sean drew the song out of the conversations, and wrote the music.

Sean is a musical director, not a theatre director, but Dominic had linked up Sean with the two directors of Brokentalkers, Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, who create innovative and accessible live performances. They put shape to it. Sean did the vocal side; he taught us how to sing, and the two lads were the ones who put a visual and a three-dimensional shape on it.

I got involved because Sean phoned me. I had known him years earlier and he remembered me as a younger gay man at that time. He knew I was a performer, but I had actually given up acting – seventeen years ago now. It was marvellous that he remembered me. He rang and I thought, ‘How odd. Why is he ringing me about this idea?’ I told him I can’t sing; but he answered ‘Everybody can sing’. But I’d been there before. My speech and drama teacher told me 30 years ago that I couldn’t sing. But Sean is marvellous. He said to me, ‘Your voice is fine, it’s that you can’t pitch. Your ear is atrocious!’ He taught me how to relax and listen and get my ear going. I can now follow very well. I am not the best at hitting a note out of the blue and I can lose it; but I can certainly follow now because I taught myself to listen. I can now pitch without getting too worried about it. My problem with pitching was always actually more to do with apprehension, nerves and fear, which tie you up.

I had background on stage, but not as a singer. I had been in musicals but had never sung solo. Some of the other cast members also had experience, but some had no stage experience at all. At the beginning, word was put out and signs placed at likely places, rehearsal spaces and music venues, and we took whoever came.

That’s how I got involved two years ago. We began rehearsing in April 2008, and the first performances were put on for the Bealtaine festival of that year, with just six songs. This, for me, was the best comeback you could ever get! Instead of two weeks in the Tivoli doing something everybody forgets, it’s two years all in all and is still there.

I don’t know how Sean knew that I wanted to get back into performing, so it was very serendipitous, very amazing. I had given up acting fifteen years before this, simply because I couldn’t afford to live on an actor’s income. So I became a waiter and manager in restaurants. I got a bit tired of that eventually as I got older and my mother was getting infirm and I promised I wouldn’t send her into a home. I moved into her house and became her official carer for eight years until she died.

When we did the first performances two years ago, she was still alive, and I was just about able to work around it and rehearse at night, but I knew I’d never be able to do the show again because I couldn’t get the carers. Two weeks before she died, at ninety-six-and-a-half, she said to me, ‘Go back to what you love’. She had been an actress in her day!

The narrative for ‘Silver Stars’ comes simply from the songs themselves, but each is presented differently, sometimes through dialogue, with spoken word, or sometimes with visuals to support them. One film we used had been made by Brendan Fay, an Irishman in New York who runs the St Patrick’s Day Gay Parade in Queens. He was part of the famous Paddy’s Day Riots on 5th Avenue back in 1991, when the Ancient Order of Hibernians didn’t like the fact that openly-gay Irish people participated in the parade.

We had video footage of him during the 1991 riots and also footage he had made ten years ago of Stanley and Kathleen Rygor, about their son Robert Rygor, who had died of AIDS. Robert had become quite political and he had made speeches at the Democratic Party Convention about the lack of official response to the AIDS crisis. His parents always thought he just attended meetings; but after he died, they discovered the strength and power of what he contributed.

A year after that Bealtaine premiere, Brokentalkers and Sean decided that he should write two more songs to extend the piece. So, last summer, he got us involved in developing it. Sean decided he would interview the cast about abut their lives. Two songs were written out of our workshop, based on his themes of rejection, alienation, perfection and so forth, both negative and positive aspects. As we discussed the topics and found stories from our own experiences, every now and then Sean’s eyes would sparkle and he’d scribble down notes – because somebody had come up with a line that resonated for him. A few weeks later, he presented us with the two songs! Now we had eight songs.

We were invited to do the Dublin Theatre Festival. We had good all-round feedback, and a producer attached to the New York Public Theatre saw our preview. After the show, she rang her boss. Within a few days, we got an invitation to New York. We performed there as part of the ‘Under the Radar’ festival in January 2010. We’re just back from a two-night performance in Paris. Both trips were made possible with the support of Culture Ireland.

When we were in New York with Silver Stars, we got to meet the Rygor family, who appeared in the videos. This was something phenomenal for us because we had been working with videos of them talking about their son Robert as backdrops on stage for our performances since 2008. We had never expected to meet the people themselves.

Creativity of any kind is a positive outgoing experience for people no matter what your sexuality or your age, or what combination of both. Any form of creativity – whether a pottery class or singing class or dance workshop – is a way of meeting other people and can lead to some kind of exegesis, some kind of process that is always going to be an uplifting experience. Creativity takes us out of the little world we are in, even if only for an hour a week. I’m thinking of going to these over-50s dance classes ...