Collected Plays and Teleplays (Irish Literature) (2 page)

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 well—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.

I am indebted to John O’Brien and Jeremy M. Davies at Dalkey Archive Press for entrusting me with the work of editing these plays for publication. I must also thank Neil Murphy who has served as both advisor and collaborator over the years. Thanks also to Jack Fennell—who translated
The Knife
(
An Scian
) from the Irish—and to Keith Hopper, for his enthusiasm about O’Brien’s work. Much thanks is also offered to Aaron Lisec and James Bantin at Southern Illinois University Morris Library, to Robert O’Neill and Justine Sundaram at Boston College Burns Library, and to Scott Krafft at Northwestern University Charles Deering McCormick Library.

1
That too was later changed to Myles na Gopaleen.

2
According to Clissman (Clissmann, Anne. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings [Dublin: Macmillan, 1975], p. 260), it ran until late March. However, Costello and Van de Kamp claim it only ran for two weeks (Costello, Peter, and Peter van de Kamp. Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography [London: Bloomsbury, 1987], p. 81).

3
Quoted in Costello and Van de Kamp, p. 81.

4
Ibid, p. 81.

5
Ibid, p. 81.

6
Cronin, Anthony.
No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien
(London: Grafton, 1989), p. 134.

7
Costello and Van de Kamp, p. 81.

8
Hopper, Keith.
Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist a Young Post-Modernist
, Revised 2nd edition, with a foreword by J. Hillis Miller (Cork: Cork UP), 2009, p. 24.

9
Costello and Van de Kamp, p. 82.

10
Ibid, p. 11.

11
Ibid, p. 13.

12
“Introduction to O’Brien, Flann.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play?
ed. Robert Tracy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994) p. 15.

13
Cronin, p. 213.

14
As Anthony Cronin explains, this was not the end of the story, as a little more than a decade later O’Brien would write a defense of the play in
Cruiskeen Lawn:
“He was by then (1954) of the opinion that it was ‘a masterpiece, saturated with a Voltaire quality, and penetrating human stupidity with a sort of ghoulish gusto.’“ Cronin, p. 135.

15
Clissman, p. 263.

16
An Scian
was discovered in the Boston College archives by Louis de Paor in 2002.

17
Listed as
The Ideas of O’Dea
in Clissman and on the manuscripts themselves, they were eventually produced by RTE as
O’Dea’s Your Man.

18
Clissman lists only fourteen, but there are two separate “No. 12” scripts. Of these fifteen, however, only thirteen were produced.

19
In the only sustained critical reading of any of Flann O’Brien’s plays, Amy Nejezcj-leb makes the case for the importance of the teleplays within the O’Brien canon by citing their popularity: “In the letter to Legge dated 15 February 1964, he indicates that his television series,
O’Dea’s Yer Man
, is more successful than his work at the
Irish Times:
‘My stuff for Jimmy O’Dea on Telefis has the highest TAM rating in the country, with advertising time before and after it booked into 1965.’“ She also argues that Marie-Thérèse serves as something of a counter-argument to critics concerned about evidence of misogyny in Flann O’Brien’s novels. (“O’Brien’s Your Man: Myles, Modernity, and Irish National Television,”
‘Is It About a Bicycle?’: Flann O Brien in the Twenty-First Century
, ed. Jennika Baines [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011], p. 100).

A Note on the Texts

The version of
Faustus Kelly
included here is based exclusively on the Cahill Publishers edition of 1943, which was optioned by the publisher before the play was produced. The version of
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play
included in this volume comes from the complete “production copy” of the play that Robert Tracy discovered at the Northwestern University Library. I have followed Tracy’s lead in ignoring what he refers to as the various “stage directions and deletions by Hilton Edwards,”
¹
meaning that with the exception of very minor typographical changes the inclosed version mirrors Tracy’s Lilliput Press edition of the play.
²
I have also taken the liberty of including two versions of
Thirst
in this collection. The shorter version will be familiar as the text published in Cockburn’s
Stories and Plays.
³
In her
Critical Introduction
Anne Clissman quotes approvingly from the longer version—which is nearly fifty percent longer than the published version.
⁴
Both plays are represented in the archives at Southern Illinois and Boston College (see below); however, there is nothing in the archives that indicates which of the two was intended as the final version.

The remainder of the enclosed plays and teleplays are taken from either of two archives: the Brian O’Nolan Papers, 1914–1966 (1/4/MSS 051), Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; and the Flann O’Brien Collection, 1881–1991 (MS97-27), Archives and Manuscripts, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. I have given preference to hand-written amendments and have corrected occasional typographical errors. Some of the versions at Southern Illinois University and Boston College include accompanying sketches drawn by Flann O’Brien himself, not reproduced here. Stylistically, I have followed the lead of Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy in
The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien;
that is: “The punctuation, which varies a little from play to play, has been standardised (em-dashes without spaces—for instance—is the preferred format, while we also use three dots and a space for ellipses mid-sentence . . . and four dots for ellipses at the end of sentences. . . .). Throughout the volume, English and Hiberno-English spellings are used instead of the American forms.”

The standard publication format for printed versions of stage plays that have been performed is to include both a list of “Characters in the Play” with descriptions (
dramatis personae
) along with an original cast list. However, I have not included
dramatis personae
for
The Insect Play
or
The Handsome Carvers
—as none were provided by Flann O’Brien himself (
The Knife, The Handsome Carvers
, and
A Moving Tale: A Dublin Hallucination
have no casts lists since they were never performed). For the same reason, many of the teleplays do not contain a list of Players (and none contains a cast list).
⁵

1
“Introduction to O’Brien, Flann.
Rhapsody in Stephens Green: The Insect Play?
Ed. Robert Tracy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994) p. 1.

2
Robert Tracy’s edited version of
The Insect Play
also includes extensive endnotes explaining various cultural and intertextual elements to the play. This version by comparison takes a more “popular” approach.

3
Flann O’Brien,
Stories and Plays
, ed. Claud Cockburn (1973; London: Paladin, 1991), pp. 81–94.

4
Clissman, p. 263.