Drama/poetry: I first became aware of the dramatic quality of Padraic Fallon's imagination from reading his adaptation of Raftery's Dialogue with the Whiskey in Iremonger-Greacen's Faber anthology of 1948. And to hear it declaimed by Anthony Cronin in one of the hostelries near the old UCD was an education in itself.
Kindled, I went in search of Fallon's work, something easier said than done, since there was no Irish poetry publisher then. He was to be found mainly in Seamus O'Sullivan's Dublin Magazine, a surprisingly open venue (RS Thomas, Kavanagh, early Beckett) considering the frail quality of its editor's lyrics. There was a Fallon elegy for FR Higgins, which I thought decanted the sorrow of a whole lost Irish generation with an almost Lorca-like intensity.
Then, one evening in 1950, on the steam radio, I heard an extraordinary sound: Fallon's first verse play, Diarmuid and Gráinne. Its sweep, its lyricism bowled me over, seeming to lift the roof of my Herbert Place boarding house. It sounded more like an opera than a play, and I remember incidental music by Boydell or Victory.
I never heard it again, although a fragment appeared in the faithful Dublin Magazine. But according to that marvellous gossip, Mervyn Wall (every period needs its Boswellian tattle-tale), Austin Clarke rang up Radio Éireann next morning, declaring: "This is what I have been fighting against all my life!"
True or false, why such passion? After Yeats's death, Clarke had tried to keep the idea of poetic theatre alive in Ireland. His Lyric Sunday evenings in the Abbey Theatre were among the few real literary occasions in depressed post-war Dublin. It was under these auspices that I saw the blasphemy of Yeats's The Herne's Egg, and heard Fallon's Raftery's Dialogue with Death declaimed. And Clarke's own plays, which were tightly constructed, held together by rhyme, internal rhyme and half rhyme.
Whereas Fallon's seemed more like opera, with poems interspersed like arias. The first play here is based upon The Vision of Mac Conglinne, a medieval Irish masterpiece. Mac Conglinne was a cult figure for Clarke as well, a renegade spirit like Mervyn Wall's Fursey. Fallon grafts on a "rivalry between two kings, Cathal of Munster and Fergal of Ulster, for possession of Queen Ligach. They symbolise South and North, Summer and Winter, respectively, while Ligach may be taken as a type of the Great Goddess, as well as the inspirational White Goddess beloved by Robert Graves, whose favours may bring death or madness."
So said Fallon's editor, his son Brian, and it is surely a tall order for any play to fulfil. I wonder if the dramatist might have done better by sticking closer to the original, which is the only medieval Irish text to rival The Frenzy of Sweeny.
There is a fine translation by Kuno Meyer, and Fallon expands on its central vision of a fairytale house made of food:
The doorpost was white custard
Frozen till it stood,
The windows were white wine.
The doors were cheese, a lovely wood.
The shortest play, The Poplar, has almost the immediacy of a ballad; indeed, it begins with music, the instruments of a Land League band discovered in a corner by children generations later. Their tootle and bang must have sounded well on the radio, recalling those days when every town had its own pipe band.
The central character is an old Land Leaguer who has committed murder - that is, he shot a brutal landlord. He has confessed but not repented, and he will die when the old tree behind his house is cut down, a tree he himself had planted. The whole of the play recalls the torpid atmosphere of the south of Ireland in the old days.
On Sunday the gates
Of quiet open and the slow sluices allow the tide
Of things to go its different gaits . . .
With The Hags of Clough we are back in the mytho-poetic world of Fallon, top-heavy with archetypes. Once again there is the scholar poet, the Son of Learning, with his bog latin and his healing powers: there is even a version of Summer Delights the Scholar. He has a doppelganger or double, a twin brother who is a centaur-like jockey. Stir in the ageing Earl of Leitrim, a bishop and a lovely though headstrong young lady, and you have a rich confection, too rich, one imagines, for either stage or radio, the dramatic equivalent of a plum pudding.
Fallon's many radio plays belong to a period when a poet might nearly make a living from the medium, or at least broaden their audience. Several of Louis MacNeice's radio verse plays were also published, such as The Dark Tower, and his last was produced by Liam Miller for the Abbey Theatre. And of course Under Milk Wood brought Dylan Thomas that larger acclaim a poet often longs for. With Austin Clarke, Fallon seems to have contributed most to Irish achievement in this now, alas, almost extinct form. Nowadays poets such as Tony Harrison, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness turn back to the Classics, but that is another story. In the meantime, where is that lovely Diarmuid and Gráinne?
John Montague's most recent publications are Drunken Sailor, (Gallery Press, 2004) and translations of Claude Esteban, A Smile Between the Stones, (Agenda Editions, 2005)
The Vision of Mac Conglinne and other plays Edited and with an introduction by Brian Fallon Carcanet Press, 242 pp, £14.95