Come Here To Me!

“The Dublin play that started London!” (Image credit: the excellent JPdonleavy-compendium.)

J.P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man is, to my little mind, second only to Ulysses as a Dublin masterpiece of fiction. Like Joyce, Donleavy had his fair share of detractors upon publication of the work, and its eventual banning on both sides of the Atlantic was almost routine. The novel trashes the proclamation of politician Oliver J. Flanagan that there was “no sex in Ireland before television”, and it is a brilliant journey through the catacombs, darkened alleys and public houses of the Irish capital in the 1940s, through the eyes of a sex (and drink) addicted American here thanks to the post-war G.I Bill that enables him to study in Trinity College Dublin. In particular, I adore Brendan Behan’s brief cameo as Barney Berry, “son of the rightful Lord Mayor of Dublin.” Behan was the first to see a manuscript of the work, and his amendments were mostly included by Donleavy.

As was the custom for a 1950s masterpiece, Donleavy’s work made the leap from printed word to stage, being performed in London and Dublin in 1959, four years after its initial publication in Paris. The stage adaptation, performed at the Gaiety Theatre, made it all of three nights before being shut down by clerical pressure. It remains one of the most curious incidents in the long history of Irish censorship, showing that there were agents beyond just the state who wished to control what was read, seen and enjoyed by the Irish public.

When The Ginger Man took to the London stage, it attracted the ire of some in the Irish media. The play was running at the same time as Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Seán O’Casey’s Cock-a-doodle Dandy, with the Evening Herald lamenting the politics of these works for providing a view of Ireland that was “misleading and distorted….A non-Irish foreign visitor to London would come away from these plays with a depressing opinion of Ireland.”

Richard Harris dominated the reviews of The Ginger Man, with even the most cynical of theatrical reviewers acknowledging his brilliance in the role of Sebastian Dangerfield. At London’s Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden, they came to hear every bad word, though a few were cut. After six weeks, the production transferred to Dublin. Here, it made it all of three performances before clerical pressure led to its sudden cancellation.

To the Evening Herald, a trip to the play amounted to a “sordid and repulsive evening to the theatre.” Going further still was the Irish Independent, to whom the play was a disgrace almost without parallel:

The Ginger Man is one of the most nauseating plays to ever appear on a Dublin stage and it is a matter of some concern that its presentation should ever have been considered. It is an insult to religion and an outrage to normal feelings of decency.

Unlike the Playboy of the Western World, The Plough and the Stars or The Rose Tattoo, there was nothing in the line of audience denunciation, at least nothing significant enough to make it into the media. But then, after only three presentations, it was reported that the play was finished. The following statement was issued by the Gaiety to the press on the third night of the run:

The management of the Gaiety announce that the run of The Ginger Man will be discontinued after tonight’s performance because of the lack of co-operation by Spur Productions Ltd. of London, who refused to make cuts as demanded by the management on Monday.

The driving force behind the collapse of the production was Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. As McQuaid’s biographer John Cooney has noted, “one of the Archbishop’s secretaries arrived at the theatre to convey His Grace’s disapproval of the play, which had been described in the newspapers as an insult to religion and decency. ‘There goes a battleship’, Richard Harris remarked as the priest left the theatre.” In the words of theatre historian Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, “McQuaid’s action was perhaps most menacing because it was not only so effective but also wholly outside the rule of law.” McQuaid’s influence would be utilised repeatedly in this period against what he regarded as low culture. Famously, he would condemn Edna O’Brien’s breakthrough novel as “a smear on Irish womanhood”.

Donleavy never forgave McQuaid for his action, and it took four decades before the play returned to the stage in Dublin for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1999.  Despite its initial banning, more than forty million copies of The Ginger Man have been sold internationally, and Sebastian Dangerfield’s exploits continue to shock and fascinate new readers.

In memory of J.P Donleavy, who died a year ago this month.