'Flann O’Brien had conservative views': Eamon Morrissey picks his cultural touchstones
Eamon Morrissey plays Cass Cassidy in Fair City. Picture: Beta Bajgart
My mother brought me to a production of Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in the Abbey sometime in the 1950s. I was about 14, 15. I was fascinated with it. Sitting there, I realised I didn't want to be in the audience. I wanted to be up on the stage with the actors. That was the moment I fell in love with acting.
I knew Seán O’Casey’s world well. My father was a 1916 man. He was in the South Dublin Union in Easter Week. He was on the Republican side in the civil war and very instrumental in setting up Fianna Fáil. It was part of a background in my life. Even if you wanted to get away from it, you couldn’t. I’m named after Éamon de Valera. It’s been said by others about my father: “He wasn’t a follower of de Valera; he was a devotee.”
There was a story circulated about my father that he was shot in the leg and arrested by the British during the War of Independence. He was in hospital, waiting to have an operation on the leg. The night before the operation, a priest came in to give him extreme unction, which was the custom at the time: “In nomine Patri et filii et Spiritus Sancti … there will be a milk float outside the side door for 6.15 in the morning, get on it.” And he got on it, and escaped. He was on the run from then on.
Over the years, of the hundreds of plays I’ve been involved in, my favourite opening line is from O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Mary Boyle is reading the paper and she says: “On a little by-road out beyant Finglas, he was found.” You're going downhill from there. It’s such a downer. It’s a line that is still relevant today in Dublin's gang wars.
My favourite last line comes from way back in the Abbey Theatre in the 1980s. We did a production of Oedipus Rex. The chorus at the end sums up all the triumphs of Oedipus’s life and how it all went wrong. They have a wonderful closing line: “Count no man fortunate until he is dead.”
Most of Brian Friel’s plays are set in Ballybeg, a small town, but they’re not really about Ballybeg. They’re about all human life. When Philadelphia, Here I Come! premiered in the Dublin Theatre Festival some of the critics dismissed it as a kitchen comedy, but then when we got to New York, it was suddenly appreciated for catching the breakdown between parents and children, between father and son. The audience obviously had no interest or knowledge of Ballybeg or Ireland even. They just loved and responded to the play because it captured that gap between the generations, and having to go away to find yourself.
The huge influences on me, in my early days, were Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate Theatre. They were wonderful. Hilton was a smashing director. He would give you the right kind of tutorship. He directed me in the Brian Friel productions, Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Lovers, which both went to New York. One piece of advice was: “Don't wave your hands about too much, dear boy. It distracts from your face. I'm always telling Michael that and he won’t listen.”
You could say I’ve been acting in theatre in Dublin since 1959. That world revolved around the top of Grafton Street and St Stephen’s Green. Brendan Behan was around. Paddy Kavanagh was around; gruff as hell, he was. You couldn’t help but know them because they all shared the same pubs. Not that I drank at the time, but that's where life was, where all the discussion and chat went on. None of them talking to each other, of course. They had fallen out years beforehand, as was the practice with Irish writers.
Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen was part of that Dublin in the 1950s. People used to quote his newspaper columns: “Did you read Myles today? Did you hear what Miles said?” It was part of the culture. I started to read him a bit myself and then I started to read the early Myles. He was really at his peak it in the 1940s when he wrote all those wonderful characters like The Brother. I started learning bits of his writings as party pieces and it slowly evolved towards a show. He's a great contrast of a figure. He is so open and fun, having fun with everything, yet he was a very conservative-minded man. This often happens with satirists. They can poke fun at all the foibles of any society yet they are very much at the heart of it.
Flann O’Brien had conservative views on lots of issues. He was in tune with issues of church, state, property and how to run society. As a civil servant, he was a part of that. But the man was a genius. He got in trouble [laughs] – he was about the only civil servant ever to lose his job. He was forced to retire, which financially was a terrible disaster for him. At the same time he was supposed to be working in the civil service, he was writing freelance pieces in the newspaper (“11am: I'm writing from my office in Scotch House [pub]”) and personally attacking the department minister he worked under in his newspaper columns, which didn’t go down very well.
Jonathan Swift was a huge part of my life. He's probably the greatest satirist of all. At times, it's very hard to know if he’s being satirical or not. He was endlessly publishing leaflets and pamphlets on various political issues. One proposal he had was that all beggars – of which there were many in Dublin in the early 18th century – should by law have to wear a big notice on their chests saying where they came from. It sounds shocking, but in fact his idea was an attack on the landlords of the estates they came, where landlords behaved so badly they starved people out. He was in that milieu of criticising “too much wealth, in two few places”.
