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. 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.
Alanna Gillespie draws out the opposing accounts of the audience invoked by O’Brien, roundly denounced as ignorant but embraced as pivotal.
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. 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. Moreover, to consider Flann O’Brien in terms of his dramatic output involves radically reframing him. 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.įagan 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. They compellingly rescue his work for stage and television from obscurity and think through how it sits alongside his fiction. 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. Both senses very patently apply to the counter-currents of O’Brien’s writings. The Oxford Dictionary defines acting out as performing or translating into action or as misbehaving or behaving antisocially. A disturbingly surreal painting by David O’Kane, Acting Out - Old Philip Mathers, referencing The Third Policeman, adorns the cover. The theatricality of O’Brien constitutes the central area of inquiry of this volume of essays. 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 Best of Myles, a volume of excerpts, was once the entry point for readers to this author. Thanks to fresh scholarly interest his posthumous output continues to expand while shedding none of its maverick nature or subversive wit. From being an artistic outlier Flann O’Brien has become, surprisingly, a steady focus of academic research in recent years.
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