The unique challenge of staging Flann

His novels aren’t always the easiest to adapt, but Brian O’Nolan has inspired work as multifaceted as the man himself. What keeps drawing people back to him?

LATE IN The Dalkey Archive, the surreal story of a civil servant who must save the world from oxygen-eating chemicals, one character makes this exasperated criticism of literature: "One must write outside oneself," she says. "I'm fed up with writers who put a fictional gloss over their own squabbles and troubles. It's a form of conceit, and usually it's very tedious."

The sentiment belongs more firmly to its author, Brian O'Nolan, a rarely tedious civil servant who wrote so far outside himself that his work splinters into many pseudonyms. The Dalkey Archivemarked the final novel by Flann O'Brien, whose ludic imagination had also delivered the ungovernable At Swim-Two-Birdsand The Third Policeman(unpublished in his lifetime). As Myles na gCopaleen, he wrote the Cruiskeen Lawn column for The Irish Timesand the Irish-language satire An Béal Bocht. And in Brother Barnabas, the creation of his wry student days in UCD, he found an author whose own characters would rebel against him, the beginning of fiction in open revolt.

This year marks Flann O’Brien’s centenary, but his real commemoration is the cult appeal known to works of wit and experiment. Like James Joyce and Laurence Sterne before him, O’Brien’s layered, literary games and stop-start narratives anticipated the way we would come to read; a daily experience of stories pullulating in unresolved tales, hopping channels and toggling between windows.

"Tell me this," asks the protagonist's uncle in At Swim-Two-Birds, "do you ever open a book at all?"

"I open several books every day," replies the student narrator. O'Brien didn't quite anticipate, though, that these works would energise various media; from the metaphysical knots of the bewildering television show Lost to sprawling German film adaptations and, more frequently, adventurously shape-shifting theatre. A two-man show, The Science of Flann O'Brien, has been developed by DCU Chemistry Professor Dermot Diamond and actor Fergus Cronin. Thirty-five years after his death, Flann O'Brien's characters are still taking on a life of their own.

Sligo's Blue Raincoat Theatre Company turns 20 this year, an ensemble with an impressive track record for combining physical theatre with literary sources. In 2007, director Niall Henry and dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke adapted The Third Policemanfor the stage (an idea O'Brien considered when the book was rejected by his publishers) to make a suitably dark and dreamlike comedy about murder, molecular theory, eternal damnation and bicycle crime. It was followed last year by their collaboration on At Swim-Two-Birds, which finally reaches Dublin this week.

“Although O’Brien was a writer, his absurd quality and his extensive range of playing with things are intrinsically theatrical,” says Henry, whose own propensity for combining different styles – text-based, physical, literary and absurdist theatre, with all the friction that brings – could be a response to O’Brien’s gauntlet. “He’s a kindred spirit in that he offered the right quality of challenge,” says Henry. “If you can pitch something slightly above your skill level, that’s good, because you have to reach to achieve it.”

For Clarke, the challenge has been to find theatrical equivalents for literary devices. “Everyone who reads Flann O’Brien is struck by how formally playful he is,” says Clarke, “so no matter what medium you adapt it for, you have to replicate that idea of reflexive playfulness and formal experimentation.”

The novel of At Swim-Two-Birdsmoves from the student narrator to a writer called Dermot Trellis, whose characters are so vividly incarnate he even has a son by one of them, Orlick, who eventually comes to write his own novel designed to undermine his father. A classic of metafiction, its appropriate response would be a work of metatheatre. And so, on a stage within a stage within a stage, the actor Sandra O'Malley eventually comes to play the narrator, Dermot and Orlick in a series of performances that emerge from one another like a procession of Russian Dolls.

Blue Raincoat's next project is an adaptation of An Béal Bocht. "Actually the text doesn't sit well on stage for long periods of time," says Clarke, who resists the threat of treating stage adaptations as a theatrical book club. "You enjoy the literary gags when you're reading, but if you tire of them you can always turn the page. In the theatre it becomes a hostage situation."

A better approach is to adopt the systems of O'Brien rather than just the words. When Arthur Riordan wrote his tremendous Improbable Frequency, a musical set in a bizarre 1940s Dublin, Myles na gCopaleen featured as a prominent character; a witty indication that the play's pseudo-scientific conceit could have stemmed direct from na gCopaleen's pen.

“The big problem with O’Brien,” says Riordan, a fan since childhood, “is that if you’re trying to write an homage, it’s very, very hard to find a voice for him. Because he has many voices, and none. This is the attractive thing about him as well. He’ll set up a voice and interrupt it with another persona, or comment on what he’s just said – or have the Plain People of Ireland interrupt him. All his work is almost a negation of the authorial voice. But it’s these levels of voice that give us such texture, humour and endless surprise.”

Last year, Riordan came closer to O'Brien's voice when he adapted the unfinished novel Slattery's Sago Sagafor the Performance Corporation, retaining much of the book – the writer's marginalia and all – while finding room to complete it as a specifically theatrical piece.

"You can't hope to achieve the myriad levels of narrative that he achieves," says Riordan, "because the act of reading is part of the thrill of it. On the other hand, you have physical beings there on stage, and that element of Slattery's Sago Sagawas the part I was most happy with, I think – where the characters themselves discover that they're fictional."

Such self-awareness endears itself to theatre in the postmodern and postdramatic age, a theatre playfully aware of its own processes, hungry for entertainment, and keen to show its mechanics to the audience. But is O’Brien too aloof – an easy writer to admire but a difficult one to love?

The adaptor who came closest to his source is Eamon Morrissey, whose one-man show The Brother has kept na gCopaleen in circulation since 1974 ("Seven to 10 years is the longest it's been out of print," Morrissey says of the show, which was, incidentally, Riordan's cherished introduction to Flann.) One day in Neary's pub, a young Morrissey, flush from reading At Swim-Two-Birdsrushed up to praise O'Brien in person.

“Well, he ate the face off me,” Morrissey recalls. “‘Only a puerile mind would enjoy that nonsense! Nonsense!’ He had totally rejected it . . . Alcohol may have had something to do with it. He was a difficult man to get close to. He had so many personas in front of him.”

Reading every column Myles na gCopaleen ever published, neatly stored in civil service ledgers in O’Nolan’s home in the years after his death, Morrissey came to see the distance of countless pseudonyms and nameless narrators as part of O’Brien charm.

“It’s that search for identity which seems to be a theme running through even the most comic bits. That is one of the things that makes it attractive to so many people across a range of time and place. The other theme that runs right through his work is that narrow line between comedy and horror. That’s a very true line. Who was it who said ‘Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands laugh?’ Laughter and horror are so closely aligned.”

In one of O'Brien's most famous and morally twisted short stories, Two-In-One, a taxidermist dons the skin of his slain employer. Soon it fuses horrifically with his own and finally he is charged with his own murder.

Brian O’Nolan, the civil servant, crept into the skin of Myles na gCopaleen and Flann O’Brien. “On one level he was part of Official Ireland, and on another he was the subversive in the corner,” says Clarke, and in some way his adaptors know a similar rupturing thrill, the rule-breaking freedom of writing outside themselves, of becoming Flann.

"If I have a connection with him," says Morrissey, "it's through his work, not the man. Even now The Brothergets to me. You find yourself doing it onstage, going, 'Well, good man yourself!'"

Blue Raincoat's At Swim-Two-Birdsruns at Project Arts Centre until March 5th