Flann O’Brien: Acting Out captures the energy and originality of O’Brien scholarship at its very best

From being an artistic outlier Flann O’Brien has become, surprisingly, a steady focus of academic research in recent years. Thanks to fresh scholarly interest his posthumous output continues to expand while shedding none of its maverick nature or subversive wit.

The Best of Myles, a volume of excerpts, was once the entry point for readers to this author. But many too discovered him through performances, the much-loved shows of Val O’Donnell and Eamon Morrissey, the avant-garde adaptations by the Blue Raincoat company and the many stagings of the novels by Dublin theatres.

The theatricality of O’Brien constitutes the central area of inquiry of this volume of essays. A disturbingly surreal painting by David O’Kane, Acting Out - Old Philip Mathers, referencing The Third Policeman, adorns the cover. The Oxford Dictionary defines acting out as performing or translating into action or as misbehaving or behaving antisocially. Both senses very patently apply to the counter-currents of O’Brien’s writings.

The 20 essays in this substantive collection act out Flann O’Brien in a new way for readers by focusing on his drama and TV scripts and foregrounding his deep-seated preoccupation with the stage. They compellingly rescue his work for stage and television from obscurity and think through how it sits alongside his fiction. A capstone 30-page essay by Paul Fagan that catalogues productions of Brian O’Nolan’s work for stage, radio and screen is justification alone for this collection as it pieces together a playography and filmography of O’Brien that has not been undertaken before.

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Fagan commandingly argues that seeing O’Brien in terms of the stage involves reflection not only on his dramatic aesthetic but on his interest in mimicry, falsity and the meta-theatrical. Moreover, to consider Flann O’Brien in terms of his dramatic output involves radically reframing him. We no longer see him as an eccentric figure working in isolation and out of sorts with his times; instead we view him in the context of the people and institutions with which he interacted and the multiform nature of the identities that he espoused.

Strikingly, the contradictory position of O’Brien as a belated but sceptical modernist and compellingly up to the minute post-humanist comes through in these essays. Alanna Gillespie draws out the opposing accounts of the audience invoked by O’Brien, roundly denounced as ignorant but embraced as pivotal. A similar admixture of conservatism and radicalism is discerned by Richard Barlow who considers the paradox of O’Brien’s best known pseudonym culled from Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn. The character of Myles na Gopaleen is a stereotype of the Irish rogue that O’Brien emphatically mocked but yet he programmatically adopted this mask.

O’Brien’s parochialism is belied by the numerous essays here that draw out the intertextual dimensions of his work. Dieter Fuchs shows how The Third Policeman expands on the Oedipal plots of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to capture the inveterate rivalries that pattern Irish politics.

Neil Murphy discerns commonalities between the avant-garde aspects of The Third Policeman and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, while Kerry Higgins Wendt draws out the shared anti-illusionism of Bertolt Brecht and Flann O’Brien.

Tobias Harris in a densely realised exploration considers The Fausticity of Kelly in the light of Goethe’s two plays about Faust; Jack Fennell explores Myles na gCopaleen’s An Sgian and The Handsome Carvers against the backdrop of grand guignol conventions; and Eglantina Remport cross-compares O’Nolan and Lady Gregory and their use of the visual and of dramatic tableaus.

A positive re-evaluation of O’Brien’s writings for the stage is also firmly advanced in this volume. Joseph Brooker redresses views of O’Brien’s frequently discounted play Thirst. He persuasively pinpoints its performative facets and the manner in which it characteristically provides scope for virtuosic linguistic play. Lisa FitzGerald and Matthew Sweney both examine Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green and argue that it is a much more dexterous and radical version of the Brothers Čapek’s Insect Play on which it is based than has usually been presumed.

The most scintillating interventions draw out the complexities of O’Brien’s practice of authorship. The brilliant opening essay by Maebh Long shows how O’Nolan, Niall Sheridan and Niall Montgomery, who all wrote Cruiskeen Lawn columns, got caught up in quasi-plagiaristic practices that vitiated the idea of the single author as sole originator of a piece of writing. In a revealing study of O’Brien and the cinematic technique of the voice-over and disembodied voice, Paul Fagan uncovers how O’Brien undermines and dismantles identity. Relatedly, John Greaney in a meditation on Irish modernism and the many fake and composite identities assumed by O’Nolan claims that he resists determinism and will always confound our arguments and categories.

Flann O’Brien studies currently are uniquely characterised by their forward momentum, sense of excitement and spirit of collective endeavour. Given its panache and congenial erudition, Acting Out captures all the energy, originality and infectious devotion of Flann O’Brien scholarship at its very best.

Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at University College Dublin