Thom McGinty, known as The Diceman, was a Scottish actor, model, and street artist specialising in mime, who spent most of his career in Ireland, where he became a landmark living statue and honorary Dubliner.
Career
He was born in Glasgow in 1952 and was a member of Strathclyde Theatre Group in the early 1970s before coming to Ireland in 1976 to work as a nude model at the National College of Art and Design. The name "The Diceman" came from one of McGinty's employers, The Diceman Games Shop that was located, first, in an arcade on Grafton Street, Dublin, and then on South Anne Street. McGinty specialised in standing in the street, stock still and in complete silence, and in costume, for long periods of time like a living statue, and would disturb his immobility only to perform his trademark broad, saucy, pantomime wink to reward anyone who put money at his feet. When the Gardaí told him to move along for causing an obstruction in the street when crowds gathered to watch him, McGinty developed an extremely slow-motion walk that was really immobility in motion. Most of his costumes were exuberant and fanciful, and he appeared in such guises as the framed Mona Lisa, or Dracula, or as a light bulb, teapot, or clown. He was charged with breach of the peace and with wearing a costume which could offend public decency, on 15 June 1991, for a street performance in which he wore nothing but a skimpy loin cloth that failed to cover his buttocks. McGinty called himself a "stillness artist" and "a human statue". His first public performances in Dublin were as the "Dandelion Clown" at the Dandelion Market, a former bohemian market on St. Stephen's Green. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he became well-known and popular for performances on Grafton Street where he worked as a mime artist or otherwise performed in costume, to advertise the Diceman shop. When that went out of business, he was hired to advertise various other establishments, including Bewley's café, and he also promoted political causes through his work such as gay rights, the Birmingham Six, and human rights in Tibet. He lived for a time in the early 1980s in Baile Éamon behind Spiddal in County Galway where he formed The Dandelion Theatre Company. In 1989, he appeared in the Gate Theatre production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, directed by Steven Berkoff, which transferred to the Edinburgh Festival and then to South Carolina. McGinty performed in The Maids by Jean Genet, and worked also in France, Holland, Germany, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland. He acted in two films, The Metal Man and Corkscrew. He was a guest, twice, on the television chat programme, The Late Late Show, in the mid-1980s and again in 1994.
Tributes
McGinty was diagnosed with HIV in 1990. At Halloween 1994, a tribute and benefit event was held in his honour at the Olympia Theatre at which he was crowned High King of Ireland, and money was raised to buy medicines, and to pay for his funeral. He died on 20 February 1995 after a sudden decline, aged 42. His coffin was carried the length of Grafton Street by his friends past a large crowd, and was accompanied by long and sustained applause. In 1997, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Brendan Lynch, renamed a corner of Meeting House Square in Temple Bar as "The Diceman's Corner", where a plaque commemorates him. There was a tribute to McGinty in May 2001 when an exhibition of twenty of his most creative and colourful costumes, made mostly by Aidan Bradley and Kathy Kavanagh/Showtime.ie, was held during a music festival in Dublin Castle. Two poems about McGinty appeared in 2002: one called "Diceman" by Liam O'Meara, and the title poem of Paula Meehan's collection, "Dharmakaya", is also about him. The poet Brendan Kennelly wrote a tribute to McGinty in the course of which he said, "Thom McGinty's magic has to do with his ability to mesmerise his audience, to lure them out of their busy city selves and to take them away into that land of perfect stillness where marvellous dreams are as normal as Bewley's sticky buns." Actor Alan Stanford proposed in 2005 that Grafton Street should have a statue of the performer. A song called "Diceman" was released by Rocky de Valera and the Gravediggers in 2007. A plaque in memory of McGinty was unveiled at the Baltinglass courthouse during the Baltinglass Street Festival on 27 August 2010. There is another plaque dedicated to him in Tralee, on the footpath in Denny Street at the corner of Castle Street where he performed during the Rose of Tralee.
