A play by Irelands most celebrated comic writer, Flann OBrien, lost for fifty years, has been discovered in the archives of Northwestern University, Illinois, by an American academic. The OBrien play, Rhapsody in Stephens Green, was put on in Dublin by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company at the Gaiety Theatre during Lent in 1943 with a cast of 150 representing millions, as is obligatory with an insect play. But, presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the aspersions it seemed to cast on married life and the superpatriotic Fianna Fail party, it only ran six days and was never again performed However it and the context in which it was born and rapidly snuffed out gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics. -Peter Lennon, The Guardian
A play by Irelands most celebrated comic writer, Flann OBrien, lost for fifty years, has been discovered in the archives of Northwestern University, Illinois, by an American academic. The OBrien play, Rhapsody in Stephens Green, was put on in Dublin by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company at the Gaiety Theatre during Lent in 1943 with a cast of 150 representing millions, as is obligatory with an insect play. But, presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the aspersions it seemed to cast on married life and the superpatriotic Fianna Fail party, it only ran six days and was never again performed However it and the context in which it was born and rapidly snuffed out gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics. -Peter Lennon, The Guardian
