Tarry Flynn: An eccentric rural comedy about a questionable past
A young farmer, much like his creator Patrick Kavanagh, isn't easy to reconcile with.
Pavilion Theatre, Dublin
★★
Many will hold up a copy of Tarry Flynn, Patrick Kavanagh’s 1947 novel about a young farmer in Cavan, and take it as gospel. Who can question the accuracy of this parochial oblivion where adults live sexless lives, where their destinies are hemmed in by family duties and farm ownership? The rural idyll wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Based on his own experiences, Kavanagh pulled off something that was accepted as general truth, and yet peculiarly idiosyncratic at the same time. “I’m the two ends of a gulpin,” says Tarry, with frustration, kicking himself for not flirting with a woman passing through his fields. (A “gulpin” is a stupid or foolish person, for those who haven’t heard it in a while). Such creative slang may explain why Conall Morrison, adapting Tarry Flynn in 1997, seized a connection to a comedy that is broader than Kavanagh’s novel.
In Morrison’s adaptation, revived by Nomad Theatre Network, Tarry shows all the signs of being a rebel. He leisurely smokes cigarettes at the risk of being late for mass. A copy of Madame Bovary sits in his back pocket while he writes poems. In performance, Colin Campbell nicely plays up Tarry’s delusions about his attractive appearance and the greatness of his artistry, lending to a hubristic rise-and-fall: Fr. Daly, a vigilante priest played by Matthew Malone, puts the community on high alert after a young woman Mary (Sarah Madigan) is pushed off her bike by an unknown assailant, sending Tarry to take cover.
In the events that follow, Tarry is faced with a choice between two women: the courteous, well-respected Mary, and Alexandra Conlon’s casual, frank Molly. At the same time, the expansion of his farm leads to a violent feud with a neighbouring farmer (Seamus O’Rourke). The achievement of Morrison’s playscript is in neatly mapping out these plotlines, whereas the emphasis on comedy comes across as forced jollity. What seems aimed as jokes are really old-school insults (“Go lang, ye scut, ye’) and surreal touches (talking farmyard animals) that, without any build-up to a punchline, come across as random.
That leaves director Aaron Monaghan with a parade of eccentricities that triggers neither relief nor anxiety. (Any impactful gags are owed to the cast and the verve of their deliveries). Occasionally, the direction can feel as restless as the material. It’s difficult to fathom one solemn scene, for instance, when Tarry hears the consoling words of his dead father against the mysterious sway of unknown, silhouetted figures in the background.
There are greater gains to be made towards the conclusion, when the life-changing arrival of Tarry’s uncle from out-of-town (Manus Halligan) is staged with a blend of absurd visual gags and dark omniscience. "The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than 300 miles,” he says, advising Tarry to leave.
Indeed, it was with distance that the novel was written – Kavanagh had left his rural Monaghan home a decade before it was published. It may be reassuring to close the book on the past, but the past has a way of returning to raise difficult questions. That Tarry attacks one woman he desires, and abandons another after she becomes pregnant, isn’t easy to reconcile with a growing awareness of Kavanagh as a vicious man. (In a chilling echo of Tarry, Kavanagh once pushed the painter Norah McGuinness off her bike, in what sounded like a serious assault).
Tarry Flynn deserves its own life independent of its author, who forged an influential image of himself as a counter-culture eccentric, an image which buried a lot of his wrongdoings. This play version mightn’t push such cruelties from people’s minds so easily.
Until 3rd April. Touring An Grianán, Letterkenny and Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda. livindred.ie
Friends,
In case you missed it, my review of X’ntigone (“X’ntigone review: Contemporary spin on Greek tragedy loses its way”) and my feature on the Friel wave (“Brian Friel’s plays come alive again after a strange decade”) were published recently in the Irish Times.
- Chris
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