Edna’s girls return to their country roots

IT’S been well documented that Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was banned and indeed copies of it were publicly burned in Scariff over 50 years ago, but the disgrace has long passed and even morphed into praise and some adulation.
When she was a pariah in her home county a half century back, no one would have envisaged that she would be honoured here and that people would pay to see her own stage adaptation of The Country Girls. But that’s what will happen next Wednesday and Thursday night when the Red Kettle Theatre Company bring their production to Glór.
Artistic director Ben Hennessy said many women of the author’s own vintage have been coming to see the show, but it does have a broader appeal.
“We’ve had a huge population of older women coming to see the show. That said, what she has written is a very contemporary piece of theatre. She didn’t go back and look at the novel and try and adapt them. She’s talked about how she more or less ignored the novels and wrote the story for the theatre from memory. It’s obviously not as shocking as what shocked the nation years and years ago.”
He describes it as a coming of age story and feels that the honesty of the narrative was probably what caused the controversy.
“Really what was shocking was how frankly this young girl narrates the story. I think that was it. It was told from the beginning, from a 14-year-old’s point of view, up to the time she was about 22, the novels go through those years and for some one to be that frank and to be able to stand up to the Church in the way that she did, in the convent in the novel, and to be as frank about her sexual feelings.
“Most controversially she had a relationship with an older man, Mr Gentleman as he’s called. In some ways that’s more shocking for us now than perhaps it was then. It began when she was only 14 but all they did at that time was hold hands and he gave her a spin to Limerick. She speaks about it in her mind and in the novel to us and the feelings she has for us. It’s very much a kind of love story, but now with all the knowledge we have of paedophilia, it’s harder for us to look at that then it was at the time, which was perhaps a more innocent time. The relationship is never consummated, let’s put it that way and in the play she ends up going off with someone else.”
Glór is one of a relatively select group of theatres that will stage the production during this run.
“We’ve only played Waterford and the Gaiety and we’re about to do Athlone, Ennis, Sligo, Cork and Galway. It’s a big enough show, we’ve a cast of nine and it’s not cheap to tour. There are a lot of venues and we hope to tour it again in the spring, there are 13 other venues looking for it.”
He said the company first made contact with the author some time back. “We knew she was working at it and she had worked a little with Michael Murphy (who is directing the production) at looking at an adaptation and I’d been talking to him about directing something else and we approached her then. She began working on it then and she had a draft ready for rehearsals here last year.”
He said some of the actors are particularly busy on stage. “The two young girls are played by Holly Brown and Caoimhe O’Malley. Mr Gentleman is being played by a guy called TJ Kelleher, but every other character and there must be 30-odd characters, are played by a company of six, who at one stage transform from her family to people that she meets in Dublin. In a way it adds a theatrical style to things.”
He also paid tribute to the director’s influence.
“Michael Murphy has directed it and he’s one of the most visual and physical directors in the country. It was a great marriage to have someone as contemporary theatrically as him with an icon like Edna.”