Flann O'Brien: Plays and Teleplays Read online

  Other Works by Flann O’Brien

  NOVELS

  The Poor Mouth

  At Swim-Two-Birds

  The Third Policeman

  The Hard Life

  The Dalkey Archive

  COLLECTIONS

  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

  Introduction

  A Note on the Texts

  Stage Plays

  Faustus Kelly

  Thirst (short version)

  Thirst (long version)

  Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play

  The Knife

  The Handsome Carvers

  A Moving Tale: A Dublin Hallucination

  Television Plays

  The Boy from Ballytearim

  The Time Freddie Retired

  Flight

  The Man with Four Legs

  The Dead Spit of Kelly

  O’Dea’s Your Man, Episode One—The Meaning of Malt

  Th’ Oul Lad of Kilsalaher, Episode One—Trouble About Names

  Contributors

  Introduction

  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 pseudonym12) 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.

  O’Brien does change the formula somewhat in The Time Freddie Retired, which for its first two acts is fairly standard fare. In Act One the recently retired Freddie is bragging about all that he means to accomplish in retirement, albeit against the various protests of his obviously long-suffering wife, Maggie. True to our expectations, in Act Two we bear witness to Maggie’s plight as her layabout husband only ever manages to get out of the house for some “elbowbending” in the evening. The rest of the time he is underfoot and dirtying up the place. In Act Three, when we expect that Freddie is about to get his comeuppance, he is visited by Hackett, a zookeeper who is seeking part-time help. Oddly enough, there isn’t even much in the way of a final gag. Freddie is to work part time at “curry-combing” kangaroos in the zoo. And while he isn’t too happy about it, neither does he reject it outright: “Kangaroos? Me? At my age?” It’s almost as if O’Brien has built his audience up to expect a punchline, only to refuse his audience that gag in the end—which is, of course, a gag in itself.

  A Moving Tale: A Dublin Hallucination is also organized in such a way as to suggest a reversal of fortune on the part of the characters only to veer into anti-climax in the end. The Man has engaged the Agent to view his household goods and to provide him with a quote for having them moved to Swanlinbar, where he means to take up a new position. However, only after the Agent has passed through the house and insulted both the house and the Man’s furniture does the Wife tell the Man that the job has been given to another. The Agent is a compelling character in his own right as he drives the Wife to complain to the Man upon his departure: “Don’t let me catch you bringing any other dirty character like that into this house” (p. 280). Notwithstanding the fact that none of the deserving parties receive their expected comeuppances, however, the dynamic between the characters—and, as always, O’Brien’s language—makes the piece engaging all the same.

  While The Man with Four Legs is yet another piece where the central character suffers a reversal of fortune, it inverts the formula of The Time Freddie Retired in such surprising ways that it is, to my estimation, one of the best plays in this volume. Like Freddie, O’Brien (O’B’) is an office worker, albeit one who is much more dedicated to his work. However, O’B’ is continually put upon by the various women in his office to purchase raffle tickets for one cause or another, which he only does as the quickest means of getting them out of his office so that he can get back to work. This is the start of no end of trouble when he is finally drawn as the winner of “A grand donkey, a lovely animal” (p. 367).

  Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the play is the unflappable attitude with which O’B’ faces all that follows. That, yes, he has been saddled with an unfortunate prize. And, true enough, he may well be the victim of a conspiracy to unload a sick and unwanted donkey on an unsuspecting mark. But even while the donkey is not the treasure he might have hoped for, he ultimately sees it as his responsibility all the same. And so while he does grumble a bit when he has to pay the outstanding bills for the donkey—as well as for its transport, its vet bills, and finally to have the donkey put down—a more excitable man might well have balked. O’B’s tragic flaw is this same unflappability, which only gradually leads him down the road to ruin: “Counting the loss of the gun and the possible fines, I’d be down maybe a hundred quid. And perhaps six months in Mountjoy. AND THE LOSS OF MY JOB!” (p. 383)

  The Boy from Ballytearim moves farther from O’Brien’s “anecdotal” style than any of the other included teleplays, but in this case, I think, not for the better. O’Brien apparently thought that a humorous regional accent alone could be the basis for the work, as he explains in the preface material for the play:

  As you will see, the sentiment of Moira O’Neill’s Poem has been turned upside-down and the pathos largely nullified. An attempt is made to achieve comedy by the exploitation of the regional accent, after the manner of O’Casey and the Dublin accent. (287)

  While, to be sure, O’Brien cannot help but be funny, accents alone are hardly sufficient to quash the pathos of the original poem. By contrast, O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth never relies solely on dialect for its humour, but, rather, satirizes the very fetishization of dialect as we
ll—and it is in that satire that much of the humour of The Poor Mouth resides, an affect that is entirely absent from The Boy.

  Notably, The Knife expands its satirical lens to mock the various idiosyncratic commitments that the Irish cultural purists of the day were so prone to taking on. Tadhg and Peig argue over the various advantages of belonging to Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and Glún na Buaidhe, a disagreement which only ends when Tadhg stabs Peig with a knife he had unknowingly received from the Gaelic League itself. As Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O’Brien was well known for discussing similar issues in his Cruiskeen Lawn column, and this play serves as an intriguing addition to his perspective on the issue outlined there. Indeed, the play, though little more than a sketch itself, has much more to offer than The Handsome Carvers, which reads suspiciously like a skit written for the Abstinence League, as in that version a man stabs his wife in a drunken rage soon after taking his very first drink of whiskey.

  The series O’Dea’s Your Man was conceptualized as a vehicle for introducing Jimmy O’Dea—who had already had a long and distinguished career on stage and radio—to television audiences. The basic concept was that Jimmy O’Dea would play a railway watchman, a role that would provide him a medium for sustained socio-political discussions similar to those O’Dea engaged in on radio. True to form, Jimmy continually espouses old and outdated perspectives on Irish society against the more modern protests of Ignatious (David Kelly). Th’ Oul Lad of Kilsalaher provides a similar dynamic, as the old and opinionated Uncle Andy squares off with his niece, Marie-Thérèse, who Andy insists on calling “Puddiner” against her objections. If nothing else, Th’ Oul Lad of Kilsalaher is notable for the centrality of Marie-Thérèse, whose prominence in the play comes as something of an anomaly given the scarcity of women in O’Brien’s work.19

  It is my hope that, with scarcity no longer barring their way, fans of O’Brien will find here the same verbal brilliance and satirical wit that they admire in his other work: Anyone who has been hungry for more of Flann O’Brien’s wit, satire, and literary trickery will find much here to enjoy—and, perhaps, perform. I also hope that the publication of this volume might lead to a more complete understanding of Flann O’Brien’s artistic development, and, especially, to the role that performativity played in his artistic oeuvre.