TlMULTY
You could’ve at least warned us it was No Contest.
O’GAVIN
How? It crept over me in a divine sickness. That last bit she sang. “The Lovely Isle of Innisfree,” was it not, Doone?
FOGARTY What else did she sing?
THE OLD MAN (exasperated)
What else? He’s just lost some of you a day’s wages and you ask what else she sang!
O’GAVIN
Sure, it’s money that runs the world. But it is music which holds down the friction.
PHIL (C voice from the back of the theatre) Hey! What’s going on down there!
TIMULTY (aside to the Yank) It’s the cinema projectionist—!
THE OLD MAN Hello, Phil, darling! It’s only the Team!
FINN
We’ve a bit of a problem here, Phil, in ethics, not to say esthetics.
THE OLD MAN (smiling his grandest) Yes, now, we wonder—could you run the Anthem over?
PHIL’S VOICE Run it over?!
There is a rumble of protests from the winners, approval from the losers.
O’GAVIN A lovely idea!
TIMULTY It is not! Doone won fair and square!
THE OLD MAN An Act of God incapacitated O’Gavin!
KELLY
A tenth-run flicker from the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven caught him by the short hairs, you mean!
FOGARTY We’ve never run a sprint over before
O’GAVIN (sweetly)
Phil, dear boy, is the last reel of the Deanna Durbin fillum still there?
PHIL’S VOICE It ain’t in the Ladies’.
O’GAVIN
What a wit the boy has. Now, Phil, do you think you could just thread the singing girl back through the infernal machine there and give us the Finis again?
PHIL
Is that what you all want?
There is a hard moment of indecision.
FOGARTY (tempted)
Including, of course, all of the song “The Lovely Isle of Innis-free”?
PHIL The whole damn island, sure!
Everybody beams. This has hit them where they live.
THE OLD MAN Done! Places, everyone!
DOONE and O’GAVIN race to sit down.
THE YOUNG MAN
Hold on! There’s no audience. Without them, there’re no obstacles, no real contest.
FINN (scowls, thinks) Why, let’s all of us be the audience!
ALL (flinging themselves into seats) Grand! Fine! Wonderful!
THE YOUNG MAN is left alone, looking at his friends.
THE YOUNG MAN I beg pardon.
THE OLD MAN (seated) Yes, lad?
THE YOUNG MAN There’s no one outside by the exit, to judge who wins.
Everyone is shocked to hear this. They look around.
TIMULTY Then, Yank, would you mind doing us the service?
THE YOUNG MAN nods, backs off, then turns and runs back out to the exit door, onstage.
PHIL’S VOICE Are ya clods down there ready?
THE OLD MAN (turning) If Deanna Durbin and the Anthem is!
PHIL’S VOICE Here goes!
The lights go out. The music surges. A voice sings. By the exit door, THE YOUNG MAN tenses, waiting, checking his watch. He holds the door half open, listening.
THE YOUNG MAN
Forty seconds . . . thirty . . . ten seconds . . . there’s the Finale . . . ! They’re—Off!
He flings himself back as if afraid a flood of men will mob out over him. We hear the grand Ta-Ta of cymbals, drums, brass. Then—silence.
THE YOUNG MAN opens the door wide and peers into the dark, then stiffens to attention as
The National Anthem plays. Even shorter this time, at double-quick speed.
When it is over, THE YOUNG MAN steps in and peers down at the long row where the “audience” and the two competitors are seated. They all stand and look back and up at the projection room.
Tears are streaming from their eyes. They are dabbing their cheeks.
THE OLD MAN (calls) Phil, darling . . . ?
FINN . . . once more?
They all sit down. Only TIMULTY remains standing, eyes wet. He gestures.
TlMULTY
And this time . . . without the Anthem? Blackout.
Music. A swift Irish reel, with blended overtones of the lilting “Innisfree,” old Deanna Durbin songs, and at the very last, the Anthem, in its most truncated form.
The real audience can, if it wishes, run for the exits, now, for our Play has come to
THE END
The Queen’s Own Evaders,
an Afterword by Kay Bradbury
I had never wanted to go to Ireland in my life.
Yet here was John Huston on the telephone asking me to his hotel for a drink. Later that afternoon, drinks in hand, Huston eyed me carefully and said, “How would you like to live in Ireland and write Moby Dick for the screen?”
And suddenly we were off after the White Whale; myself, the wife, and two daughters.
It took me seven months to track, catch, and throw the Whale flukes out.
From October to April I lived in a country where I did not want to be.
I thought that I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing of Ireland. The Church was deplorable. The weather was dreadful. The poverty was inadmissible. I would have none of it. Besides, there was this Big Fish . . .
I did not count on my subconscious tripping me up. In the middle of all the threadbare dampness, while trying to beach Leviathan with my typewriter, my antennae were noticing the people. Not that my wide-awake self, conscious and afoot, did not notice them, like and admire and have some for friends, and see them often, no. But the overall thing, pervasive, was the poorness and the rain and feeling sorry for myself in a sorry land.
With the Beast rendered down into oil and delivered to the cameras, I fled Ireland, positive I had learned naught save how to dread storms, fogs, and the penny-beggar streets of Dublin and Kilcock.
But the subliminal eye is shrewd. While I lamented my hard work and my inability, every other day, to feel as much like Herman Melville as I wished, my interior self kept alert, snuffed deep, listened long, watched close, and filed Ireland and its people for other times when I might relax and let them teem forth to my own surprise.
I came home via Sicily and Italy where I had baked myself free of the Irish winter, assuring one and all, “I’ll write nothing ever about the Connemora Lightfoots and the Donnybrook Gazelles.”
I should have remembered my experience with Mexico, many years before, where I had encountered not rain and poverty, but sun and poverty, and come away panicked by a weather of mortality and the terrible sweet smell when the Mexicans exhaled death. I had at last written some fine nightmares out of that.
Even so, I insisted, Eire was dead, the wake over, her people would never haunt me.
Several years passed.
Then one rainy afternoon Mike (whose real name is Nick), the taxi-driver, came to sit just out of sight in my mind. He nudged me gently and dared to remind me of our journeys together across the bogs, along the Liffey, and him talking and wheeling his old iron car slow through the mist night after night, driving me home to the Royal Hibernian Hotel, the one man I knew best in all the wild green country, from dozens of scores of Dark Journeys.
“Tell the truth about me,” Mike said. “Just put it down the way it was.”
And suddenly I had a short story and a play. And the story is true and the play is true. It happened like that. It could have happened no other way.
Well, the story we understand, but why, after all these years, did I turn to the stage?
It was not a turn, but a return.
I acted on the amateur stage, and radio, as a boy. I wrote plays as a young man. These plays, unproduced, were so bad that I promised myself never to write again for the stage until late in life, after I’d learned to write all the other ways first and best. Simultaneously, I gave up acting because I dreaded the competitive politics actors must play in order to work.
Besides: the short story, the novel, called. I answered. I plunged into writing. Years passed. I went to hundreds of plays. I loved them. I read hundreds of plays. I loved them. But still I held off from ever writing Act I, Scene I, again. Then came Moby Dick, a while to brood over it, and suddenly here was Mike, my taxi-driver, rummaging my soul, lifting up titbits of adventure from a few years before near the Hill of Tara or inland at the autumn changing of leaves in Killeshandra. My old love of the theater with a final shove pushed me over.
One other thing jolted me back toward the stage. In the last five years I have borrowed or bought a good many European and American Idea Plays to read; I have watched the Absurd and the More-Than-Absurd Theatre. In the aggregate I could not help but judge the plays as frail exercises, more often than not half-witted, but above all lacking in the prime requisites of imagination and ability.
It is only fair, given this flat opinion, I should now put my own head on the chopping-block. You may, if you wish, be my executioners.
This is not so unusual. Literary history is filled with writers who, rightly or wrongly, felt they could tidy up, improve upon, or revolutionize a given field. So, many of us plunge forward where angels leave no dustprint.
Having dared once, exuberant, I dared again. When Mike vaulted from my machine, others unbidden followed.
And the more that swarmed, the more jostled to fill the spaces.
I suddenly saw that I knew more of the minglings and commotions of the Irish than I could disentangle in a month or a year of writing and unraveling them forth. Inadvertently, I found myself blessing the secret mind, and winnowing a vast interior post-office, calling nights, towns, weathers, beasts, bicycles, churches, cinemas, and ritual marches and flights by name.
Mike had started me at an amble; I broke into a trot which
