SINCE the spirit of Ibsen's drama shimmers through The Ante Room, Kate O'Brien's novel of conflicting loves and stifling family life set in Mellick (Limerick) in the 1880s, it is fitting that it has now been adapted for the stage.
O'Brien made several unsatisfactory attempts to write for the theatre, but it is for her novels that this once censored author is remembered. Although most of her work was out of print when she died in Canterbury in 1974, she has posthumously become one of Limerick's most celebrated writers, successfully rescued from neglect.
Her novels were republished in the early 1980s, first by the now extinct, Dublin based Arlen House press and later by Virago. The annual weekend held in Limerick in her honour is one of the liveliest of the clutch of literary gatherings and summer schools that swell the cultural calendar. A collection of lectures from the weekend's first 10 years, called With Warmest Love, has been edited and published by historian John Logan.
The Ante Room re-creates the world of the newly prosperous, Catholic, middle class Limerick of "the merchant princes", a milieu that O'Brien knew well and from which, writing in the early 1930s, she had established a sense of distance. By going to Spain in the early 1920s, after university, she shrugged off her background and cultivated the life long fascination with Spanish culture that informs her work, as may be seen in Mary Lavelle, That Lady and above all, Farewell Spain, written during the Spanish Civil War. With its criticisms of Franco and comments on the threat of "the rising gales of nationalism", it caused her to be barred from Spain until two years before her death.
While not formally innovative, The AnteRoom is less conventional than it first appears. Elements of florid Victorian melodrama and the English Romantic novel are combined with a distinctly 20th century detachment and resistance to narrative do a sure in the story of Agnes Mulqueen, a reflective young woman in love with her sister's husband. While her dying mother dotes on her unhappy, syphilitic brother Reggie, her father, an effaced, shadowy figure, creeps around his wife.
In later years O'Brien said that it was her own favourite book and it includes themes that will be familiar to readers of her other work repressed sexual passions, women trapped by paternalist conventions, an independent mind straining against orthodoxy and provincialism. A wealth of dramatic scope, then, for Island Theatre Company's players, under Terry Devlin's direction.