Your Only Man
Sep. 1st, 2008 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanIf you have a spare hour and a half this week, and want your life greatly enriched, go to the BBC website for Radio 3, and pull up Listen Again on last Sunday's play, "Your Only Man".
Those with a knowledge of fine literature, especially fine Irish literature, will probably recognise the reference. This is a play about Brian O'Nolan. Or rather, Flann O'Brien. Or also rather, Myles naGopaleen.
Or truly rather, about all three. It treads a reasonably well-worn path, of the writer being dogged by his own pseudonyms, but since Flann/Myles's writing has such a delightfully surreal and twilit quality about it anyway, the device works perfectly.
There is a strong Irish cast - Ardal O'Hanlon, Dara O'Briain (who can act), Pauline McLynn, etc.
The play is funny, and sad, and strange, just like the writing of the man himself.
Really, listen to it, and read some Flann O'Brien.
for example (roughly - not an exact transcript):
Brian is in a police station, havign been hauled in for (very) drunken driving.
Guard: "Would you walk along that line there, lino'ed to the floor, by the Sargeant's bicycle?"
Brian: "Walk along it? To the end?
Guartd: "Just try to keep along it steadily"
Brian: "Fair enough. But I'm telling you, as a tightrope-act, this isn't very daring. So if you're planning to put me in a circus ... when I was a boy, I might have been able to cycle along it, with my arms folded, but I'm not sure I..."
Guard: "Yes yes - the line, Sir"
Brian: "Just ... walk, you say"
[sound of unsteady footsteps]
Brian: "There. Done ... You may have a faulty line here"
Those with a knowledge of fine literature, especially fine Irish literature, will probably recognise the reference. This is a play about Brian O'Nolan. Or rather, Flann O'Brien. Or also rather, Myles naGopaleen.
Or truly rather, about all three. It treads a reasonably well-worn path, of the writer being dogged by his own pseudonyms, but since Flann/Myles's writing has such a delightfully surreal and twilit quality about it anyway, the device works perfectly.
There is a strong Irish cast - Ardal O'Hanlon, Dara O'Briain (who can act), Pauline McLynn, etc.
The play is funny, and sad, and strange, just like the writing of the man himself.
Really, listen to it, and read some Flann O'Brien.
for example (roughly - not an exact transcript):
Brian is in a police station, havign been hauled in for (very) drunken driving.
Guard: "Would you walk along that line there, lino'ed to the floor, by the Sargeant's bicycle?"
Brian: "Walk along it? To the end?
Guartd: "Just try to keep along it steadily"
Brian: "Fair enough. But I'm telling you, as a tightrope-act, this isn't very daring. So if you're planning to put me in a circus ... when I was a boy, I might have been able to cycle along it, with my arms folded, but I'm not sure I..."
Guard: "Yes yes - the line, Sir"
Brian: "Just ... walk, you say"
[sound of unsteady footsteps]
Brian: "There. Done ... You may have a faulty line here"
