Cutting loose in the city

Edna O’Brien’s 1960 novel The Country Girls was banned. Now she has adapted it for the stage, she tells Carl Dixon

ADAPTED from the 1960 Edna O’Brien novel that scandalised the country, The Country Girls will run in the Cork Opera House from Jun 11 to 16. It’s the story of two Irish girls, Kate and Baba, who leave their 1950s convent life to find their way in the world. Directed by Mikel Murfi, the play stars Holly Browne as the poetic, romantic Kate, and Caoimhe O’Malley as the forceful Baba.

O’Brien herself adapted The Country Girls for the stage. “I have always loved theatre, it is a very different form of writing,” she says. “I didn’t want to just take scenes from the book and adapt them. In fact, I didn’t even open the book. A novel is about language and feelings, a play is about the interaction and dynamic between people. I envisaged it as a play where the world is more involved in their story; more epic, if you will.

“You have huge freedom when you write a play, but then you have to make it a reality, you have to create that starry night or snow scene, which isn’t always easy on a limited budget. I believe a great director brings a controlled wildness and fluidity to the stage. Mikel Murfi has done something similar by bringing in dance and song; the play has vitality and really flows.”

O’Brien was born in the village of Tuamgraney, in County Clare, and was a serious child in a house dogged by a heavy-drinking father and a mother who struggled to hold life together. It may have been a tough, repressive childhood but it set a seed: a writer’s imaginative life commences in childhood, O’Brien would later say, and a chronicle based on an unhappy Irish childhood is a grand literary tradition. In Mother Ireland, a series of essays from 1976, O’Brien wrote: “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.”

O’Brien escaped via marriage to a much older man, through children and a move to London. The marriage ended a decade later, but The Country Girls, her first novel, charmed American and British readers and set her feet firmly on a literary path. By contrast, the impact of the novel in her native land was incendiary. Its sexual content, although mild by modern standards, was too graphic for an inhibited and conservative Catholic country, and the censor banned it. The parish priest in Tuamgraney arranged a public burning of the book.

How does O’Brien feel about the reaction to her work? “I was so hurt and mortified at the time, and my mother was so embarrassed,” she says. “It was a very choked and repressive society, at the time. You have to forgive or you would end up stuck in that same, angry little corner and that is not what I am about. One critic complained that the play isn’t scandalous in the way that the book originally was, but he misses the point. Of course, we can’t go back to the society of 1960, that would be absurd, but the primary objective of the novel wasn’t to shock. It was, and remains, an odyssey and a journey. The search for love is the basis of Romeo and Juliet, after all, and the underlying theme of most of the songs ever written.”

When she wrote The Country Girls, there was obvious autobiography; O’Brien was the Irish girl from a small village making her way in the big city. What does she feel about her most famous characters? “I still have huge affection for these two girls,” O’Brien says. “They were, after all, my first children, and although I created them, they are independent of me. Each, on her own, would have driven me mad, but I enjoyed the two girls playing off each other. It is, at its heart, a love story and Mr Gentleman is probably more vital in the play than he was in the novel. Baba just wants to be well-heeled, but Kate seeks redemption through poetry and love. I have always been a huge fan of Chekov; of course, every writer worships him, even though it is a mystery how he was able to touch the soul so indelibly. In the final scene, Kate wants to be a writer but is also in love with Mr Gentleman and the two don’t tally up; perhaps it has echoes of Nina’s character in The Seagull.”

O’Brien says that although society changes, the inner landscape of feelings and dreams stays the same. “I think the emotions at the heart of the play are still relevant for young people, even if they didn’t go to a convent or experience the Ireland that I did,” she says. “The aspirations and hopes, and the follies, if you like, are still there. The adventurousness, the challenge of succeeding in love, that feeling of ‘stop the world I went to get on’; they still exist.”

Notwithstanding the Irish reaction to The Country Girls, O’Brien has had a successful writing career. Her works include A Pagan Place (1970), about her childhood in Ireland, biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron, and plays. In London, she mixed with actors and writers and was briefly a patient of controversial psychiatrist RD Laing, in the 1960s: “I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn’t do that — he was too mad himself — but he opened doors,” she said.

Never one to back away from a subject that interested her, she hadn’t finished raising shackles in Ireland.

In Down by the River (1996), she tackled the subject of abortion and the ‘X case’, and she wrote about Brendan O’Donnell, whose triple murders shocked the country, in her novel In the Forest. House of Splendid Isolation is about a terrorist on the run, and as part of her research she visited Dominic McGlinchey in prison. She described him as a “a grave and reflective man”.

O’Brien has always been a writer’s writer.

In the words of writer Andrew O’Hagan: “She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international.”

Novelist Colum McCann has called her the “the advance scout for the Irish imagination.” O’Brien thanks Cork for the first major Irish literary award she has received, namely the Frank O’Connor short story prize in 2011 for Saints and Sinners. Does she find it odd that such major literary awards have not been forthcoming in the past? There is a very slight pause for decorum’s sake.

“At the risk of being conceited, I could use some other, less polite adjectives than odd, but I will leave it to you to supply them,” she says, dryly. “I certainly owe Cork a drink, though.”