Read Collected Plays and Teleplays (Irish Literature) Online
Authors: Flann O'Brien
Collected Plays and Teleplays (Irish Literature)
Other Works by Flann O’Brien
N
OVELS
The Poor Mouth
At Swim-Two-Birds
The Third Policeman
The Hard Life
The Dalkey Archive
C
OLLECTIONS
The Best of Myles
Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn
At War
The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien
FLANN O’BRIEN:
PLAYS
and
TELEPLAYS
Edited and with an introduction by
Daniel Keith Jernigan
Contents
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play
A Moving Tale: A Dublin Hallucination
O’Dea’s Your Man, Episode One—The Meaning of Malt
Th’ Oul Lad of Kilsalaher, Episode One—Trouble About Names
Even as Flann O’Brien’s novels continue to garner significant critical attention, considerably less attention has been afforded his works for performance. Though this is at least in part due to the plays being traditionally, and dubiously, thought of as less aesthetically compelling than the novels, another likely explanation for this absence is that those plays which have been published (
Thirst, Faustus Kelly, Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play
—hereafter,
The Insect Play
—and the teleplay
The Dead Spit of Kelly
) have fallen out of print in recent years. The current volume seeks to rectify this, also bringing numerous other plays and teleplays into print, and under a single cover, for the first time.
While only three of the stage plays included here—
Thirst, Faustus Kelly
, and
The Insect Play
—were performed during O’Brien’s lifetime, all of the teleplays were produced and broadcast by RTÉ. Furthermore, all of the stage plays except
A Moving Tale
were originally written, published, and/or produced under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (the same name under which he wrote his long-running newspaper column, “The Cruiskeen Lawn”
1
), while all of the teleplays were produced for RTÉ television under the name Myles na Gopaleen (
A Moving Tale
was also written under this pseudonym). However, because Flann O’Brien is the most famous of Brian O’Nolan’s many pseudonyms, I have chosen to refer to him by that name as well.
The first play in this collection,
Faustus Kelly
, opened at the Abbey on January 25th, 1943, playing there for nearly two months.
2
Though arguably O’Brien’s best-known work for the stage, it received decidedly mixed reviews. While the
Irish Independent
noted that the play “earned many hearty laughs, and was applauded by a packed house,”
3
Joe Holloway wrote that “all words and no play makes
Faustus Kelly
a dull boy,”
4
and the play was dismissed by Patrick Kavanagh in
The Standard
for its vulgarity.
5
Yet even a brief summary of
Faustus Kelly
suggests that there is much to the play that an audience familiar with O’Brien’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns might find amusing—above and beyond its disrespectful attitude towards politicians of the day in its tale of a Cork councilman vying for membership in Dáil Éireann. As the play opens, “The Devil is standing behind Kelly, who is seated signing a diabolical bond” (p. 27). In the scenes that follow, Kelly is often accompanied by the Mephistophelian “Stranger,” who employs various diabolical methods to procure the election for his charge. In a final reversal, however, he decides to forego his hold on Kelly’s soul on the basis that even hell would be all the worse for accepting the Irish: “Not for any favour . . . in heaven or earth or hell . . . would I take that Kelly and the others with me to where I live, to be in their company for ever . . . and ever . . . and ever” (p. 116).
Faustus Kelly
shows a side of Flann O’Brien that is perhaps unfamiliar to his many readers, not least in the ways that the play’s very production history resonates compellingly with its thematic impulse. Most striking, perhaps, is the fact that when
Faustus Kelly
debuted, Flann O’Brien (or, rather, Myles na Gopaleen) went out of his way to confuse the question of who precisely was responsible for the work—already a muddied pool given the author’s bevy of pseudonyms. As Anthony Cronin reports, O’Brien had apparently “decided to make himself scarce” on opening night, “watching the performance from the back of the stalls,” but when the audience called for the author:
[They] were answered by a gentleman, dressed as the traditional stage Irishman with pipe, caubeen and cutaway coat, who did a little bit of a jig and then silently vanished. Holloway and some members of the audience disapproved of this extension of theatricality into the author’s appearance on stage; but in fact the gnomic figure was an Abbey actor. The play had been billed as the work of Myles na gCopaleen and it was that mystical personage who was now taking a bow, not Brian O’Nolan.
6
And Myles na gCopaleen’s appearance on stage in the form of one of the grossest caricatures of the stage Irishmen imaginable is only one of the means by which the thematic import of
Kelly
extends well beyond its political pretentions. Those in attendance on its opening night were even led to believe that they might bear witness to a riot:
Rumour had it that there might be another “Abbey Row” to equal the first nights of
The Playboy of the Western World
and
The Plough and the Stars.
Madam Kirkwood Hackett and her son were there with other Republicans—in the hope of “a disturbance,” she told Joe Holloway, the well-known diarist.
7
Where such rumours might have originated is uncertain, but O’Brien’s talent at running interference and manipulating his audience would seem to mark the author himself out as a likely suspect. (Indeed, as Keith Hopper explains it, O’Brien got his first big break working for
The Irish Times
in part as a result of the playful and self-referential way in which he employed its letters page to mock and escalate the similar controversy over a Sean O’Faolain play.
8
)
Written after
Faustus Kelly
, the one-act
Thirst
was commissioned by Hilton Edwards for a 1942 Christmas production at the Gate Theatre.
9
It tells the story of a publican who is caught out by a police sergeant for serving alcohol after hours, and who eventually coerces the sergeant to have a drink himself by telling a story about the great thirst he faced while stationed in “Messpott” during the Great War. Comprised primarily of monologue detailing a specific anecdote, the play prefigures much of the later dramatic work included here. While not as ambitious as
Faustus Kelly
, it is perhaps the most successful of Flann O’Brien’s plays, as it has been performed often and reproduced for both radio and television (for an explanation of the two different versions included, see “A Note on the Texts”).
While there is a familiar tendency to obfuscate the truth through playful exaggeration in
Thirst
, there are no colourful anecdotes surrounding its performance, which is, unfortunately, also true of O’Brien’s second (and final) full-length work for theatre,
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play
(an Irish retelling of Karl and Josef Capek’s
The Insect Play
).
The Insect Play
is set after hours in St. Stephen’s Green, and as in the Capek brothers’ version, each act is devoted to the exploits of various different species of insect, with Act I focusing on bees, Act II on dung beetles and crickets, and Act III introducing us to several varieties of ants. The play is meant as a satire of the various character types in and around Dublin (a duck and duckling, for instance, are given Dublin accents, while crickets are given a Cork accent). In his introduction to the Lilliput Press edition of the play, Robert Tracy explains that “Myles’s chief innovation is to make some ants Northern Unionists, who speak with Belfast accents. They are determined to defend their ‘holy ralugion; against the ‘dirty green Awnts’ of the South, who obey ‘thon awnt over in Rome’ and force ‘the wee awnts’ to learn Latin.”
10
Tracy’s introduction provides one of the few sustained critical treatments of any of O’Brien’s plays, calling
The Insect Play
an “essentially [. . .] new work, local rather than ostentatiously universal” for how it is “able to include a broad range of human behaviour.”
11
Of course, O’Brien might well have carried on with his audience-baiting, meta-authorial manipulations here, as he’d done with
Faustus Kelly
, except that
The Insect Play
—set to open at the Gaiety just as
Faustus Kelly
was closing at the Abbey—closed after only five days, leaving him precious little time to work. However, we can still get some sense of what O’Brien might have had in mind for the work thanks to a series of letters exchanged between Myles, Gabriel Fallon (who had condemned
The Insect Play’s
use of expletives in his review), and S. M. Dunn (according to Tracy this is another likely O’Brien pseudonym
12
) in the pages of the Standard. Apparently, Flann O’Brien has once again employed different pseudonyms to argue different perspectives, as S. M. Dunn pushes the vulgarity charge harder even than Fallon. In turn, the episode also prefigures Flann O’Brien’s later attempts to have
The Hard Life
censored: “Nearly every professional Irish author had a book banned and [O’Brien’s] gleeful anticipation of the prospect makes it clear that he was anxious to join the club.”
13
The failure of
The Insect Play
put an end not only to O’Brien’s experiments in using performance—both onstage and “in reality”—to construct and deconstruct Irish cultural stereotypes, not to mention his own public persona, but to his theatrical ambitions as a whole.
14
Much as he had with his fiction, O’Brien took a long hiatus after this brief and disappointment-filled foray into theatre, as Anne Clissman writes: “For the moment, there were no more experiments in drama. Not until 1955 did O’Brien try to write another play, when he composed the first draft of
The Boy from Ballytearim
as a television play.”
15
The three unproduced plays included here—
An Scian
(translated in the current volume as
The Knife),
16
A Moving Tale
, and
The Handsome Carvers
—have never before been collected.
O’Brien’s teleplays include
The Boy from Ballytearim, The Time Freddie Retired, Flight, The Man with Four Legs
, and
The Dead Spit of Kelly
(all 1962). The length of this collection would far exceed the standards of readability if I were to have included every episode of the two television series Flann wrote for RTÉ,
O’Dea’s Your Man
(twenty-six episodes)
17
and
Th’ Oul Lad of Kilsalaher
(fifteen episodes).
18
For that reason, this volume only contains the first episode of each series (“The Meaning of Malt” from
O’Dea
and “Trouble About Names” from
Th’ Oul Lad
) as representative samples of O’Brien’s work in this mode.
The Dead Spit of Kelly
, an adaptation of O’Brien’s short story “Two in One,” tells the story of a taxidermist who kills his boss and then proceeds to wear the deceased’s skin and to appropriate his life. Like many of the plays, however,
The Dead Spit of Kelly
relies perhaps a bit too much on its anecdotal content and “twist” ending, as Burke eventually gets his ironic comeuppance when he is arrested for his own murder. Indeed, much of the same pattern repeats itself in
Flight
, as an outspoken Englishman berates his fellow passengers and the airline staff all the while insisting that the flight they are on continue on to London despite the plane’s mechanical difficulties. The cabin and the captain have their revenge in the end, however, when it is finally revealed that they have landed in Wexford, a veritable cultural backwater by the Englishman’s snobbish standards.