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facts & Fancy
The Irish Scribe rish writers like to provoke. They are not about telling lovely fairy stories with happy endings. Sometimes they’re not even about stories at all (read or watch Beckett). What makes Irish writers interesting is that, even if you’re not quite sure what they are saying, by the end you notice that you have been poked or prodded—sometimes uncomfortably so— often with a good dose of wit. From political satire (like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) to religious “critique” like Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, provocation seems somehow bred into the Irish. Even the more mildmannered George Bernard Shaw had a go: “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.” And when the Irish writer isn’t poking at your brain, then he is almost certainly making you cry (Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa), or laugh (the plays of Oscar Wilde), or even riot. When Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was first staged, one theatergoer
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described it as “a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform.” Riots ensued; world fame followed. As for Joyce—the most famous of Irish writers—while The Dubliners may be a tough read, his innovative style had a profound effect on 20th-century literature. That said, he never won an Oscar like George Bernard Shaw (Best Screenplay, 1938, for Pygmalion).
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Classic Scribes Samuel Beckett Molloy; Malone Dies; Waiting for Godot; The Unnamable; Endgame; Krapp’s Last Tape Brendan Behan The Quare Fellow; Borstal Boy; The Big House; The Hostage
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