Aristotle’s remarks on comedy. Books XI-XX and XLVI-CXLII of Livy’s History. The later books of The Faerie Queene. Byron’s memoirs. The first version of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Parts 2 and 3 of Dead Souls. The last six numbers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. These are among the most celebrated items in the tantalizing Alexandrian library of unread texts, that mysterious depository of lost works. Until now, Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green (The Insect Play) by Myles na gCopaleen has been listed among them. Myles’s critics and biographers have mentioned the play, describing it as an adaptation from an earlier work by Karel and Josef Čapek. They have speculated about its content, drawing on reviews and recollections of the 1943 Dublin production, and on the fortunate survival of Act I among the Myles Papers now owned by the University of Southern Illinois.1
As it happens, the rest of the play has also survived, thanks to Hilton Edwards and Michéal MacLiammóir, who carefully preserved scripts and drawings during their fifty years (1928–78) together operating Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and to librarians at Northwestern University, Illinois, who purchased the Gate Theatre archive. My own interest in the Edwards-MacLiammóir years at the Gate, and especially their productions of Chekhov, led me to the Northwestern collection’s catalogue, where, with the excitement of James’s ‘publishing scoundrel’ hovering over the desk that might contain Jeffrey Aspern’s letters, or of Colonel Isham about to open the croquet box at Malahide Castle, I spotted The Insect Play. Would it be only the already published Act I? An obliging brother-in-law went to see. The Gate archive contains a typescript of the complete play, marked with stage directions and deletions by Hilton Edwards, and evidently used as the prompt copy.
‘One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,’ declares the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939); ‘A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author… O’Brien proceeds to demonstrate the principle, and to make great play with triads throughout that extraordinary novel. But he also employed the principle in life, at least in his literary life. Flann O’Brien was born on 13 March 1939, on the title page of At Swim-Two-Birds, and went on to write three more novels: The Hard Life (1961); The Dalkey Archive (1964); and The Third Policeman, apparently written around 1940, but not published until 1967.
But Flann O’Brien was also Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O’Nolan, occasionally assuming yet other identities. Myles na gCopaleen, Myles of the Little Horses, or, as he himself was to insist, Myles of the Ponies, was born in 1829, as the resourceful and loquacious horse-trader in Gerald Griffin’s melodramatic novel The Collegians. He was born again three times: as the leading character in Dion Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn (1860), freely adapted from Griffin’s novel; as a tenor role in Sir Julius Benedict’s opera The Lily of Killarney (1862), adapted from Griffin and Boucicault; and finally, yet again, in October 1940, when Brian O’Nolan borrowed his identity to write a column for The Irish Times. It is appropriate that this ‘lost’ play should have been written by a man who did not exist.
As for Brian O’Nolan, who spent many years in Ireland’s Civil Service,2 the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages records his birth — as Brian Nolan — at Strabane, County Tyrone, on 1 October 1911, his marriage in Dublin in 1948, and his death in 1966 — on April Fools’ Day. The shamrock, after all, triple-leaved, three-in-one, is Ireland’s emblem.
From the commencement of his Irish Times column, Myles became a familiar presence in Dublin. Originally written in Irish, usually in English after 1944, but sometimes in Latin or French, the column grew in popularity and notoriety, as did its recurring characters and motifs: the aristocratic Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da); Keats and Chapman; the Brother (‘The Brother says the seals near Dublin do often come up out of the water at nighttime and do be sittin above in the trams …’); the Myles na gCopaleen Central Research Bureau; the Cruiskeen Court of Voluntary Jurisdiction; the District Court; Myles’s concerns about the maintenance and treatment of locomotives belonging to the Great Northern Railway.
But the central concern was always language, its use and misuse, even when Myles was only amusing himself by parading technical terms from The Steam Boiler Year Book and Manual. His commitment to the integrity of language, and disdain for its misuse — especially by politicians — invites comparison with another great journalist, the Viennese Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Myles’s column began as a sardonic commentary on the official Irish that had become compulsory in schools and in the Civil Service after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The son of an Irish-speaking household at a time when, in one of his own favorite phrases, the Irish language ‘was neither profitable nor popular’, he scorned the stiff Civil Service Irish that came into use, and was quick to spot the frequent mistakes made by new users of the language. Promoters of ‘Revival Irish’ tended to spend time in rural areas that were still, more or less, Irish-speaking, but were also places of great poverty. Being a peasant, being miserably poor, and speaking Irish became equivalents, supposedly defining those who were truly representative of the Irish nation and its values — those who had what Abbey Theatre actors came to call P.Q., peasant quality. The only novel he published as Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht (1941), written in Irish, parodies revered peasant autobiographies: Tomás O Criomhthain’s An tOileánach (1929; The Islandman); Peig Sayers’s Peig (1939); and Muiris O Súilleabháin’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933; Twenty Years a-Growing). These autobiographies describe the poverty-stricken and sometimes dangerous lives of their authors on the remote western seaboard. In Ireland an béal bocht, the poor mouth, describes someone who is always talking about his own miserable circumstances, but Myles also used the phrase to remind his readers that the poorest of their fellow citizens, living in great squalor, were those native speakers of Irish so admired by well-fed and well-housed middle-class enthusiasts for the revival of the Irish language — lá breá, fine day, as they were derisively called, from their habit of shouting out that phrase to laboring men and women as they sauntered about the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) in summer. Myles loved the Irish language, but had little respect for Gaelic League enthusiasts.
Irish nationalists and Irish writers have been preoccupied with basic questions about language, at least since Douglas Hyde’s 1892 manifesto, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.’ A year later Hyde founded the Gaelic League, dedicated to maintaining Irish as a spoken language. Subsequently, while some language activists envisaged the ultimate replacement of English by Irish, official statements avoided, or saw no reason for, a clear definition of the overall linguistic goal. For most Irish writers the demand that they abandon the language they habitually speak and write, English, has been a provocative challenge rather than an imperative. French writers do not have to consider whether or not they should write in French, nor do German writers need to ponder their right to use German. Some Irish writers did and do write in Irish, like the great novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970), or the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Most writers follow Yeats by continuing to write in English, sometimes, as with Synge and Lady Gregory, adapting English words to Irish grammatical structures. Joyce records Stephen Dedalus’s uneasiness as he talks with the English-born Dean of Studies in Portrait; Joyce solved the English/Irish problem for himself by inventing his own polyglot language in Finnegans Wake, Beckett chose to write in French, and revered silence. Most Irish writers, then, have responded to the controversy about what language they should use by becoming self-conscious about language, and often making language itself their theme, almost their protagonist. Myles does so in Acts I and III of Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green.
Though Myles began at The Irish Times by parodying and ridiculing those who misused Irish, he was soon considering misuses and abuses of English as well. A dictionary of clichés became a regular feature of his column:
Is man ever hurt in a motor smash?
No. He sustains an injury.
Does such a man ever die from his injuries?
No. He succumbs to them.
Of what was any deceased citizen you like to mention typical?
Of all that is best in Irish life.
Correct. With what qualities did he endear himself to all
who knew him?
His charm of manner and unfailing kindness.
Till what great dairy-farm re-union may you sit and talk there?
Till the cows come home.
In one memorable column Myles compared the English and Irish texts of the Irish Constitution, claiming that ‘Some of the English is bad and most of the Irish is disgracefully bad. More, the two languages frequently express dissimilar and mutually repugnant meanings in stating what purports to be the same Article. If we fail to make the most of such little English as we now remember,’ he wrote on another occasion, ‘it may bode ill for us … There are still tribes old-fashioned enough to take the view that intelligible talk is one way by which one can distinguish humanity …’4 Like Joyce, whose ‘Epiphanies’ recorded exchanges or remarks overheard in the streets of Dublin, Myles liked to present the banalities of ‘the plain people of Ireland’. His Keats and Chapman pieces were carefully constructed to culminate in an atrocious pun on some often-repeated phrase. A short story, ‘The Martyr’s Crown’, is about a woman who became pregnant because she went to bed with a British officer in 1916, thus preventing him from searching her house and finding the rebels hiding upstairs. The story ends with a glimpse of the son of that union, and the inevitable but unexpected inversion: ‘thousands … of Irish men and women have died for Ireland … But that young man was born for Ireland.’5
Flann O’Brien was the author of novels only. Myles na gCopaleen wrote The Irish Times column, but was also the author of three plays. Thirst, in one act, was written for inclusion in Jack-in-the-Box, the Gate Theatre’s 1942 Christmas entertainment. Faustus Kelly, in three acts, opened at the Abbey on 25 January 1943 and ran for two weeks. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green, commissioned by Hilton Edwards, was performed by the Gate Company at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre from 22 March to 27 March 1943. Later Myles wrote four plays, and a fifteen-episode television series, for RTE, the Irish television company.
Flann O’Brien’s novels have all been successfully adapted for the stage by other hands. Myles had one of the dramatist’s essential gifts, the ability to write dialogue, especially dialogue that is at once banal and entertaining. He had a remarkable ear for local dialects of Irish-English: Trinity College English, Dublin English, Cork English, Belfast English — all of them on display in Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green. But he lacked another essential skill, that of constructing and sustaining a plot and theme. ‘All words and no play makes Faustus Kelly a dull boyo,’ Joseph Holloway complained in his diary, citing a reviewer’s demand that Myles ‘learn the craft of playwriting’. Holloway’s dramatic theories were old-fashioned, but he did recognize that Myles’s talent was for the episodic. This may be an occupational hazard of the daily columnist, as Patrick Kavanagh once suggested.6 Flann O’Brien’s novels are highly episodic, especially At Swim-Two-Birds, which constantly interrupts and interrogates its own narrative and procedures. The Third Policeman is an extended metaphysical joke in which nothing happens, nothing can happen, because time, and therefore narrative, have ceased. Given this tendency toward the episodic, it is not surprising that the brief Thirst was Myles’s most successful play, set, as it is, out of time, in a country pub after time has ended — that is, after the legal closing hour, once signalled by the barman’s cry, ‘Time, please, gents.’ The play’s action, or rather talk, occurs in a pub whose proprietor pretends he is not serving drinks to drinkers who pretend they are not drinking. The play begins with idle bar talk and then becomes a study in the power of language, when the publican describes desert heat and thirst so graphically that the Sergeant, arriving to enforce the law, must himself break the law by drinking the proffered pints.
Faustus Kelly starts well, with a dumb show prologue in which Kelly sells his soul to the devil, in return, we later learn, for election to the Dáil and success with the widowed Mrs Crockett. Act I works because it is all talk, the meeting of a County Council and the interplay among its members: the wheedling Shawn Kilshaughran, the oleaginous Cullen, the cantankerous Reilly, even the silent Hoop. Myles displays his skill at Irish local accents with Kilshaughran’s ‘thick western brogue’, the Town Clerk’s ‘strong Cork accent’, and Hoop’s ‘pronounced Northern accent’. But Act II introduces a new character and new issues insufficiently connected with those of Act I; III meanders, to end feebly with the devil tearing up the contract Kelly had signed and vowing to have nothing more to do with Irish politicians. The play also suffers from Kelly’s tendency to address everyone as if he or she were a public meeting, in long turgid election speeches — good enough parodies of contemporary political oratory, no doubt, but tedious rather than amusing. When the devil tears up the contract, we suspect it may be because he realized how boring Hell would be with Faustus Kelly in it.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green succeeds because it does not depend on sustaining a plot or theme. It is appropriately episodic, each act coming to its own resolution, and is in fact a series of one-act plays. Myles did not need to contrive a plot or devise a way to sustain it. He had only to adapt the episodic structure of the Čapek brothers’ Czech original.7 But despite owing its concept, structure, and some incidents to the Čapeks, Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is essentially an original work by Myles himself. The critical failure of Faustus Kelly may have made this man of many identities look for yet another. Like the poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), who often protected himself by describing his own poems as translations from the German, the Hebrew, the Ottoman, Myles may have decided to protect himself by offering Dublin his own version of a play that had succeeded in London and New York — or rather, his own improvization upon aspects of that play.
The original Insect Play, in Czech Ze života hmyzu (1921), literally ‘from the life of insects’, was written by Karel Čapek (1890–1938), like Myles a novelist and journalist as well as playwright. His collaborator was his brother, Josef Čapek (1887–1945). The first performances were at Brno (3 February 1922) and Prague (8 April 1922).8 Adapted as The World We Live In, by Owen Davis, the play ran for 111 performances at the Jolson Theatre, New York, opening on 31 October 1922. A London production soon followed, at the Regent Theatre (5 May 1923; 42 performances), this time in Paul Selver’s translation, very freely adapted by Nigel Playfair and Clifford Bax.9 At the Regent, a very young John Gielgud played an effete poet-butterfly, Elsa Lanchester was a voracious Larva, and Synge’s beloved Maire O’Neill, who had created the roles of his Pegeen Mike and Deirdre at the Abbey, was Mrs Beetle.
Karel Čapek was the first Czech author since Comenius to achieve a reputation outside his own country, largely due to his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), within five years translated into German, Slovenian, Hungarian, English, Japanese, French, and Russian.10 R.U.R., translated by Selver, opened in London in April 1923, for 126 performances, adding a concept and a word — robot — to the English language. Čapek’s play imagines the invention of ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (the phrase is in English in the Czech original), who take over most of the world’s work, but eventually rebel and destroy their human masters. Many later works of science fiction have repeated Čapek’s apocalyptic vision of man destroyed by his own machines. But Čapek made a subtler point. His robots rebel when they have been made so human as to think and feel, and recognize their own status as slaves. Čapek’s real target was the dehumanization of human workers in the new world of assembly lines and efficiency experts. At about the time he wrote, Henry Ford’s autobiography, H.N. Casson’s Axioms of Business, and several similar works advocating ‘efficiency’ appeared in Czech translation, among them Principles of Scientific Management (1911; Základy védeckého vedeni, Prague 1925) by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the inventor of the time-motion study. Taylor’s ideas are parodied in R.U.R. and again in Act III of Rhapsody.11
The chief source for The Insect Play, as Karel Čapek acknowledged, was La vie des insectes (1910), extracts from the ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques (1879–1907) by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915). Fabre describes the activities of various insects, including those who figure in the play, in language that continually invites us to compare them with humans:
Once his ball is ready, a dung-beetle issues from the crowd and leaves the work-yard, pushing his spoil behind him. A neighbour, one of the newcomers, whose own task is hardly begun, suddenly drops his work and runs to the ball now rolling, to lend a hand to the lucky owner, who seems to accept the proffered aid kindly. Henceforth, the two cronies work as partners. Each does his best to push the pellet to a place of safety. Was a compact really concluded in the workyard, a tacit agreement to share the cake between them? … The eager fellow-worker, under the deceitful pretence of lending a helpful hand, nurses the scheme of purloining the ball at the first opportunity … I ask myself in vain what Proudhon introduced into Beetle-morality the daring paradox that ‘property is based on plunder’, or what diplomatist taught Dung-beetles the savage maxim that ‘might is right’.12
Myles’s explicit reference to St Stephen’s Green emphasizes his intention to localize the play in Dublin, to make it Irish and his own. The freedom with which he treated the Čapeks’ text, at times ignoring it completely, resembles his sometimes parodic, sometimes creative, use of the Old Irish Buile Suibhne in At Swim-Two-Birds.
The Čapek Brothers published a ‘comedy in three acts, with prologue and epilogue’. In their Prologue, a Pedant who collects butterflies encounters a Tramp who soliloquizes, partly in blank verse. The Tramp suffers from some metaphysical sorrow. He has fought in the Great War, and emerged, if not shell-shocked, disillusioned. A man, but also Man, he meditates aloud on the Pedant’s claim that Nature is eternal mating. Myles’s Scene 1 eliminates the Pedant, and is a little Dublin vignette of bullying, official, social, and linguistic, as a Grounds Keeper with a strong Dublin accent aggressively clears St Stephen’s Green at closing time. He is intimidated by a well-dressed lounger who claims — in a ‘very “cultured”’ accent — to be an important official, threatens retaliation, and reduces the Keeper to abject pleading. The Tramp, with an even more pronounced Dublin accent, appears only at the end of the Prologue, commenting on the presence of bees. Myles’s Prologue has little to do with the rest of the play, apart from introducing the Tramp and clearing Stephen’s Green of all but one of its human inhabitants.
The Čapeks’ Act I is about butterflies. Myles’s is about bees. The Čapek butterflies are bright young things, children of the jazz age, the females literally flappers. Bored, languid, promiscuous, they haunt an elegant little cocktail-bar, where the timid and yearning Felix (Gielgud’s 1923 role) pursues Iris (Apatura iris, the purple emperor) with sentimental verses, but fails to recognize her sexual eagerness. Myles’s bees are even more enervated, and discuss suicide in Trinity accents. A Drone recites passages from Shakespeare, the closest Myles gets to Felix’s poetic effusions. The Queen Bee seeks in vain to mate. The Tramp is stung.
Myles follows the Čapeks — or rather, their English translator — a little more closely in Acts II and III. But where the Čapeks introduce a moth Chrysalis eager to be born, Myles gives us a hen’s talking Egg. The Čapeks’ Ichneumon Fly (Ichneumonidae) and its Larva become a Duck and Duckling. Myles retains the Brothers’ Dung-beetles, male and female, giving them ‘appalling’ Dublin accents and more strongly emphasizing their greedy petty capitalism. He also retains their Crickets, here with Cork accents. The Beetles’ preoccupation with their ball of dung, and the Crickets’ preoccupation with her pregnancy and their search for a new house, are repeated in Myles’s text, though putting Mr Cricket ‘in de [Civil] service’ is his addition. He also retains the Parasite, who agrees with everyone; ‘the last word in mealy-mouthed joxers’, he may owe something to Sean O’Casey’s ‘Joxer’ Daly.
In Act III, Myles’s chief innovation is to make some Ants Northern Unionists, who speak with strong 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, ‘a dad longuage’. Myles keeps the Čapeks’ satire against assembly lines and efficiency experts, and ends the act, as they do, with a savage war — in which red or British ants also attack the Unionists. When the Red Ant demands military assistance and supplies from the Orange Ants, Myles is hinting to his audience that the British were making similar demands on the Irish government. The Orange Ants’ refusal provokes an invasion by Red and Green Ants in alliance — a reversal of the real possibility in 1943, Ireland’s well-founded fear of a British invasion, which would have included Northern Irish units. Myles was able to get this past the vigilant censors, perhaps because of its sheer audacity — to end with a thinly disguised Eamon de Valera, master of all he survives, proclaiming himself Emperor of the World in Irish. As in the Čapek original, the Tramp, disgusted by the triumphant Emperor, crushes him.
‘Gob, I never seen so many children’, Myles’s final line, acknowledges without endorsing the ‘life goes on’ theme of the Capeks’ sentimental epilogue. In Myles’s epilogue, the theme is a general indifference to the Tramp’s death. The children we see, and those the courting couple plan to have, offer little reason for optimism.
Despite Myles’s popularity and verbal ingenuity, The Insect Play was not a great success at the Gaiety, playing only for a week. Though the playwright came to believe that some sort of conspiracy had been mounted against him, perhaps because his satire seemed aimed at specific individuals,13 reviewers for his own paper and for the Irish Independent were enthusiastic. The unsigned Irish Times review (probably by Brinsley MacNamara) noted that Myles ‘has taken away a good deal from the version through which we had come to know’ the play, ‘and added a great deal that is his own … he makes it rather more of an entertainment.’ But the ‘depths’ are still there, and the target, human selfishness and pride, is Swift’s target: ‘Swift’s version of Lilliput is not so very different from what the sleeping tramp … sees in Stephen’s Green.’ The Irish Times recognized in the Tramp the ‘Chorus who represents us’, and approved the local setting:
There was a familiarity … about some of the bees, beetles, crickets, ducks and ants that left us in no doubt of the part of the world we were looking at through the eyes of the Tramp. There were moments when they brought us quite close to topics of the day, when we were as near to certain things as some of those things now are to Stephen’s Green.14
The Irish Independent was even more enthusiastic (‘an enjoyable satire’), especially about the local setting, seeing ‘no artistic reason’ to prefer Prague over Dublin, ‘or why the tramp should not speak in the adenoidal whine of Dublin and in its breezy, if adjectively limited, vernacular … With the social satire cleverly adapted to our own problems I feel we saw the play as the brothers Capek would have like their own nationalists to see it.’15
Joseph Holloway, usually so difficult to please, was nearing the end of his long career as a Dublin playgoer — he died in March 1944. Holloway was present as usual on opening night. ‘Loud applause followed the fall of the curtain,’ he noted, ‘but I fear Myles had strayed miles away from the Čapeks’ play and its import. As we saw it … it was just a pointless burlesque in Irish dialect over-emphasized to the point of grotesque exaggeration.’ Holloway liked MacLiammóir’s costumes, the bees, and the mechanical movements of the ants, which he compared to those of the animated cartoons featuring Felix the Cat. But he condemned Myles’s demotic language:
The adaptor had turned the play into Stage-Irish dialect, of many counties, and introduced far too many ‘bloodies’ and ‘Ah gods’ into his text. Much of the talk reminded me of the good old red-nosed [word illegible] apelike music hall Irish cross-talkers of long ago! I am sure that the play is interesting and often touching in the original form. As we saw it at the Gaiety it was a thing of sheer burlesque and in the ants scene the Irish were held up to ridicule in cruelly crude fashion, though the scene was wonderfully conveyed … and the warring among the ants cleverly done.16
A few days later, Holloway complained again about the frequent appearance of the word ‘bloody’, quoting the Gate actor Michael J. Dolan, who had told Myles ‘that the repeated use of the word only shewed the poverty of his expression’, and adding, ‘I heard that his adaptation of The Insect Play was a flop at the Gaiety. His stage efforts are distinctly vulgar and common, and not suitable in the Gaiety, the Abbey, or the Gate.’17
T.W. of the Irish Press was even less complimentary, giving the play a dismissive ‘interesting’, but then moving to the attack: ‘I am still wondering if William Shakespeare, the Czech brothers Čapek, and Myles na gCopaleen, with a dash of Jimmy O’Dea and Harry O’Donovan, is a digestible dish.’ T.W. noted Myles’s ‘remarkable and close intimacy with the vernacular of the public hostelries of this ancient capital,’ wondered why people laughed at the word ‘bloody,’ and defended the Čapeks against their adaptor: ‘an author who depends on phony bravado like this is offering a poor substitute for drama.’ The Čapeks, he insisted,
wrote a serious satire on the cruelties of the world … They would have been surprised to find their cornerstone being used … to burlesque the divisions in this country to make a theatrical holiday.
The Čapeks, lovers of their country, would have been amazed to find their translator and adaptor using their work to mock the movement for reviving a national language and to sneer at the people of Ireland, North and South.
Other parts of the play were in extremely bad taste; cheap jokes about motherhood are not worthy of any civilization.18
Writing in the Catholic Standard, Gabriel Fallon made similar objections to the play’s ‘expletives’, provoking Myles into calling him ‘a wretched pedant’.19
The stiffness of the Irish Press review suggests a possible paying off of scores for the satire of An Béal Bocht. The Press was the property of Eamon de Valera, then Taoiseach and easily recognizable as the Irish-speaking leader of the Green Ants. The paper was the organ of the Fianna Fáil party, self-anointed as the guardian of the national language and the national identity. Though the reviewer apparently had some knowledge of the Čapeks’ work, he seems to take their play too seriously. A similarity between human and insect life was hardly a new idea in Dublin — the King of Brobdingnag ‘was amazed how so impotent and groveling an insect’ as Gulliver could be so ‘inhuman’ and bloodthirsty as to advocate the manufacture and use of gun powder.
Myles’s Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green neither betrays nor misuses its Czech source. It is essentially a new work, local rather than ostentatiously universal, but local as Ulysses is local, able to include a broad range of human behaviour. Though the Čapeks left it to the director to decide whether the characters would be people acting like insects, or insects acting like people,20 Myles is more decisive. He is bleaker, more pitiless. His humans are insects. Beckett’s tramps wait in the wings. Myles’s bracing Swiftian scorn leaves no room for optimism — except that the scorn is so presented as to provoke laughter, and laughter can be redemptive.
ROBERT TRACY
Berkeley, California
1 See Anne Clissman, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 22–3; 260–63; and Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton, 1989), 135–6. Act I was published in the Journal of Irish Literature 3:1 (January 1974), 24–39. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green was Myles’s working title, and the play was so announced until just before opening night, when it was re-christened The Insect Play, the usual English title of the Čapeks’ play.
2 O’Nolan, O Nualláin on Civil Service lists, served in Dublin in the Department of Local Government (1935–54). In 1937–43 ne was Private Secretary to several successive Ministers of Local Government.
3 See Myles na gCopaleen, The Best of Myles: A Selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, ed. Kevin O’Nolan (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), 202, 203, 219, 212.
4 Myles na gCopaleen, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn, ed. Kevin O’Nolan (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976), 137; 95.
5 Flann O’Brien, Stories and Plays (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973), 81–89.
6 Joseph Holloway, Manuscript Diaries, National Library of Ireland, MSS 2009, 163. For Kavanagh’s comment, see Cronin, 165.
7 ‘The authors know that their comedy, From the Life of the Insect World, is not a real play, a formal play … it is rather a compilation, consisting of three or four one act plays … They are somewhat connected by the figure of the Tramp…’ Karel Čapek, ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu: Před premiérou v Narodním divadle’ (Notes on Life of the Insects: Before Opening Night at the National Theatrez, Jeviště (Stage) 3 (1922); reprinted in Karel Čapek, Spisy 18: O umenia kulture (On Art and Culture) 2: 398 (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1985).
8 See Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek, Ze spolecné tvorby (From the Col lected Works), Spisy (Writings) (Praha: Československy spisovatel, 1982), 2: 403.
9 Davis’s version is in Twenty Best European Plays on the American Stage, ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 597–695; it was also published by Samuel French (1933). The Selver-Playfair-Bax version appeared in 1923 (Oxford University Press). Server’s more accurate translation is in International Modern Plays (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1950).
10 Boris Mědílek a kolektiv, Bibliografie Karla Čapka (Praha: Academia, 1990), 466–533.
11 When 2nd Engineer finds ‘a new way of mackin’ them wurk quacker’, by speeding up the count. Čapek notes the presence of ‘the idea of Taylorism’ (mystenku taylorismu) in ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu’, Spisy 18: 397.
12 Fabre, Jean-Henry, The Life and Love of the Insect, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London: A. and C. Black, 1911), 8–11. Karel Čapek acknowledges his debt to Fabre in ‘Poznámky k Zivotu hmyzu, Spisy 18: 397.
13 Cronin, 135; Peter Costello and Peter Van de Camp, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), 82.
14 The Irish Times 22 March 1943: 3. For MacNamara’s authorship, see Costello/Van de Camp 82.
15 Irish Independent 23 March 1943: 6.
16 Holloway, Manuscript Diaries, National Library of Ireland, MSS 2009, 519–20.
17 Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Dixon, California: Proscenium Press, 1970), 3 (1938–1944), 86.
18 Irish Press 23 March 1943: p. 3 col. 4.
19 Further Cuttings 169. Myles and Fallon exchanged shots in The Standard (2 April 1943). S.M. Dunn may be another mask for the playwright:
Our Theatre Critic Attacked and Defended
Letter from Myles na gCopaleen:
Dear Sir,—Last week you were good enough to publish an article by Gabriel Fallon in which it was suggested that myself and about 150 other people were engaged in presenting obscenities and salacities on the Dublin stage. I must, therefore, ask you to publish this letter.
Myself and the other people concerned are content to endure the implication that as Christians and Catholics we are very inferior to Mr. Fallon. We claim, however, a sense of aesthetic delicacy, and we protest very strongly against a dirty tirade which, under the guise of dramatic criticism, was nothing more or less than a treatise on dung. ‘There will always be a distinction,’ Mr. Fallon says, ‘between the honest dung of the farmyard and the nasty dirt of the chicken run.’ Personally I lack the latrine erudition to comment on this extraordinary statement, and I am not going to speculate on the odd researches that led your contributor to his great discovery. I am content to record my objection that his faecal reveries should be published.
This second point I want to make clear to your readers is that there is no foundation whatsoever for Mr. Fallon’s statements that the ‘Insect Play’ abounded in obscenity, filthy language, and gibes at sacred things. The three things mentioned specifically by Mr. Fallon are sex, motherhood, and double entendre. There is no reference to sex as such anywhere; it is true that there are male and female characters, but very few people nowadays consider that alone an indelicacy. There is a pathetic and beautiful passage where a cricket who is going to have a baby is murdered; as a modest part-author I am in position to call this pathetic and beautiful because the scene is Čapek verbatim. Your wretched pedant has never read or seen Čapek’s play. As to double entendre, there is not a single example of this objectionable music-hall device in the piece from first to last. The entire play is a salutary double entendre and may well present to the mentally adolescent the same sort of shock that was given by the Rouault picture [of Christ], which was denounced as blasphemous by many responsible persons and is now housed in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. That your Mr. Fallon is not even educated is evident from the extraordinary stuff he publishes in your paper every week. In the article in question, for instance, with the phraseen gamin de genie, he affords your readers a glimpse of the tired European who is not quite at home in English; this impression is more than strengthened when we find the master using the word ‘adaption’ — twice, unfortunately, thus letting out the scapegoat printer. I cannot find ‘adaption’ in any dictionary. It must be French, I suppose.
Here, however, is the main point of this letter. After sending you his disquisition on dung, Mr. Fallon communicated with the Director of the Boy Scouts employed in the play and used every endeavour to make him withdraw the boys so that the whole presentation would be sabotaged; he did not succeed, and presumably an opportunity will be found later for associating the Boy Scout organization with dung, which is Mr. Fallon’s symbol of disapproval. Since your paper honours Mr. Fallon with the role of critic, I think he is entitled to denounce every single play he sees if he feels that way about it, however much his disapproval may be the result of ignorance or mental immaturity. That he should take steps to close down a show he does not like is, I think, a unique departure in dramatic criticism. When he finds himself excluded as an undesirable from all theatres, as he well may, he will have to find some other rostrum from which to direct his foul-mouthed campaign for decency and reticence.
THE TRANSLATOR OF THE INSECT PLAY
Letter from Member of Audience:
Sir—I wish to congratulate you on your article censuring the Gaiety ‘Insect Play’ last week. In company with a Protestant friend, I visited the show and felt most uncomfortable during the first act. I muttered to my friend: ‘This is blasphemous and most suggestive’ and the answer I received was in the nature of ‘Evil to him who evil thinks’! References to the ‘Queen’ up in the sky and ‘keeping pure till we meet her’ made me squirm and the language and use of the Holy Name, along with the ‘maternity’ act in the second part, was vile.
A lady behind me roared laughing (to put it mildly) at these sallies. What was my amazement to read, then, in my programme that the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland were in the cast and a Catholic (!) Myles Na gCopaleen was the translator of this low down jibe at all that we, as Catholics, hold dear. One wonders if Catholic Dublin has loyalty to Faith and principles when such a show could take place during Lent in our principal theatre? Was it shamefacedness that prevented the author appearing on the first night at the last curtain, or was it last minute remorse, at any rate Mr. Edwards seemed annoyed and apologized for his non-appearance.
The only other paper that censured this play was the Herald. I would have written to the Independent but I know it would be useless as the papers think too much of the advertising end of the theatre business to censure their shows.
I think it is time some league was formed to rouse public opinion against the ‘taking in vain’ of God’s name which has become a scandal on the Dublin stage. Unfortunately, Catholic actors are the commonest offenders …
Every educated person, Protestant or Catholic, deplores this tendency and desires some change. Can THE STANDARD lead public opinion to demand it? Say a Matt Talbot League for Catholics, for that sainted man never heard the sacred name of Jesus pronounced without lifting his hat, and his dislike of profanity was so great that even though a humble workman his influence was such that bad language came to be unknown in his vicinity.
One occasion was reported of a profaner being faced by Matt Talbot with a crucifix and the words ‘Do you know Who you are crucifying?’ No more was said and the man hung his head and made no further reply.
S.M. DUNN
[Note: In justice to the secular press the Irish Press, and to some extent, the Times Pictorial joined in the protest against the Insect Play.—Editor, THE STANDARD.]
Our Theatre Critic’s reply and his challenge to Myles na gCopaleen: The translator’s letter speaks eloquently for itself.
Not all of its implications can be answered here or at the moment: nevertheless certain important facts must immediately be made clear.
(1) In reference to Paragraph 4 and the letter’s ‘main point’.
I had no communication whatsoever with the Director of the Boy Scouts concerning this play, nor had I communication with any officer or member of that body concerning it.
(2) As to the reference in Paragraph 3 that The Standard’s ‘wretched pedant’ has never read or seen Capek’s play —
I have read it; I have seen it; and I have reviewed it as the files of The Standard will testify.
So much for the letter, at the moment.
I now challenge the translator of The Insect Play to send to the editor of The Standard the script of the version played to the audience of the Gaiety Theatre on the evening of Monday, March 22, 1943, in order that the readers of The Standard may be convinced of the justice or the injustice of my criticism.
I append a copy of a letter sent by me to the Manager of the Gaiety Theatre on March 25.
My Dear Hamlyn, —In view of last week’s presentation by Edwards–MacLiammóir Productions at the Gaiety, I have decided to refrain from attendance at any subsequent presentation which this company may offer during the current season.
I trust that this step, which has been determined after careful consideration, will not in any way interfere with the cordial relations exisiting between The Standard Drama Critic and yourself and Mr. Elliman, and the very courteous staff of the Gaiety Theatre.
With every good wish,
Yours Sincerely.
(Signed) Gabriel Fallon.
Hamlyn Benson, Esq., Manager, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin.
20 ‘Poznamky k Zivotu hmyzu,’ Spisy 18: 399.