Opening of the third play (the long version of Thirst):
The curtain goes up on the bar. It is after hours. Light from a distant street-lamp shines faintly on the window The bar is lit (very badly.) by two candles which are set on the counter, one of them stuck in a bottle. The publican, MR. C., who is suitably fat and prosperous in appearance, is leaning over the centre of the counter talking to PETER, who is sitting on a stool side-face to the audience. JEM, who is in the nature of a hanger-on, is away in a gloomy corner where he can barely be discerned. Both customers are drinking pints; the publican has a small whiskey. The curtain has gone up in the middle of a conversation between PETER and the publican.
MR. C.: (Dramatically.) And do you know why? (There is a pause.) Do you know why?
PETER: Begor, Mr Coulahan, I couldn’t tell you.
MR. C.: (Loudly.) Because he’s no good, that’s why. He’s no bloody good!
(He finishes his drink in one gulp, turns to the shelves for the whiskey bottle and noisily fills himself another. As the talk proceeds he is occupied with pulling two further stouts to fill up the customers’ glasses PETER smokes and bends his head reflectively. JEM is silent save for drinking noises. He shows his face for a moment in the gloom by lighting a cigarette.)
This is a collection of seven stage plays and seven TV plays by Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, some of which were performed in his lifetime and some of which were not. I bought it in the run-up to the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, partly to see if Faustus Kelly, the first of the plays, was worthy of a Retro Hugo nomination, and partly to prep for a panel on Flann O’Brien that I knew I’d be doing at the convention. But I had not previously sat down and read it from cover to cover.
Some of these pieces are very slight, but some are very interesting. The 1943 play Faustus Kelly brings the Devil to the Irish Midlands to interfere in local politics. He finds it so awful that he returns to Hell. It’s interesting that the politician protagonist is depicted very clearly as living with a woman who he is not married to – and the local political activists take it in their stride. This is fifty years before Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is adaptation of The Insect Play by Karel Čapek (best known as the inventor of the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef. Like Faustus Kelly, it was performed at the Gate Theatre in 1943. Where the Čapeks’ first scene features butterflies as mindless and vain literary salon types, writing poetry to each other, O’Brien makes the characters here bees representing the posh Anglo-Irish elite, engaged in idle self-destruction. The two other scenes are less changed. In the second scene, the Čapeks’ dung-beetles are solid middle-class citizens saving for retirement; O’Brien makes Mr Beetle specifically a Dublin civil servant. And the militarist, proudly engineering ants in the last scene are Ulster ants in O’Brien’s adaptation. The satire is mean and doesn’t always land right for the twenty-first century reader, but it must have been a great production.
The other one that struck me was The Dead Spit of Kelly, about a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his boss and then disguises himself in his boss’s skin, with surreal consequences. It was shown on RTE in 1962. A film version starring Colin Morgan and Jason Isaacs was announce in 2021 but does not seem to have got off the drawing board.
The rest are shorter pieces, and some of them are rather slight (there’s a dire skit about an airplane trip from Dublin to London with an annoying English passenger). But I am glad to have read them. You can get it here.
This was the unread book that had lasted longest in my non-genre pile (though all three of the pieces that I mention above actually have strong fantasy elements). Next on that pile is, er, Black Mountain by Gerry Adams. But I acquired it only in 2021, so I’m pausing that cycle for now until I have cleared the remainder of my 2019 and 2020 books. (I have read all of the non-genre books that I acquired in 2020, finishing with Summer by Ali Smith.)
