ONE OF the highlights of the Town Hall Theatre’s current season takes place next week with Performance Corporation’s uproarious staging of Flann O’Brien’s unfinished comic novel Slattery’s Sago Saga, adapted by Arthur Riordain.
The production was a huge critical and popular hit during its initial run in Dublin during the summer, with the Irish Independent hailing it as “a monstrous pudding of a comic play...fast-moving comic fantasy”, while Totally Dublin declared it “one part theatre of the absurd, one part state of the nation, and one hell of an evening’s entertainment...a delight from start to finish…should not be missed on its revival this autumn.”
Slattery’s Sago Saga’s central character is Tim Hartigan who enjoys a quiet life as general dogsbody of Poguemahone Hall. However his peaceful existence is rudely shattered by the arrival of a Scottish woman, Crawford McPherson, who has a crazy plan to completely eradicate the potato from the Irish diet, replacing it with sago.
While this opening premise bears O’Brien’s trademark “ferociously aburdist wit”, to quote another review, in other ways the book could have seemed unpromising material for a stage adaptation. O’Brien completed only seven short chapters by the time of his death in 1966 so it is not unfair to say that it’s not so much unfinished as barely started.
However in Arthur Riordain, Performance Corporation found the perfect writer to make the most of O’Brien’s fragments. Riordain wrote Rough Magic’s hit comedy Improbable Frequency set in WWII Dublin and featuring Flann O’Brien as a character in his journalistic persona of Myles na Gopaleen.
Over an afternoon phone call from his Dublin home, Riordain explained how he came to adapt Slattery’s Sago Saga.
“After including Myles as a character in Improbable Frequency I was asked to work on a Flann O’Brien tribute event with Jo Mangan, Performance Corporation’s director,” he explains. “Then she approached me about Slattery’s Sago Saga which had been a pet project of hers for years – though she left the script entirely up to me.”
How did he go about completing and adapting the story?
“Apparently, Flann had intended the story continuing in America with one of the protagonists becoming president,” Riordain discloses. “However, I felt as he had written nothing in his life set in America that would be just too far a journey for me to make. On the one hand it’s a very exciting prospect getting to finish a Flann O’Brien novel but at the same time it’s daunting.
“So I kind of nodded to the fact that it’s an unfinished work by using a typical Flann O’Brien device that at a certain point in the play certain characters discover that they are fictional characters in a play that is in the process of being written. Once that happens various factions within the play try to wrest control of the story from each other.”
Riordain expands on some of the characters and plot-twists he added to O’Brien’s work.
“At some point I had to force myself to be as irreverent toward the work as Flann O’Brien might have been in my approach to the script,” he says. “So I made one of the characters a leprechaun and there are several supernatural elements in it.
“One tiny thread in the story I found very interesting was McPherson’s plan to buy up all the agricultural land in the country and let it back for one shilling per year, no matter what the size of the holding.
“I just wondered what this might do to the Irish property market so there’s a property bubble involved. I’ve also introduced a couple of other characters that didn’t appear in the novel, including a schoolteacher called Imelda who’s been co-opted to finish the script. Basically it turns into a battle between those who are for the cultivation of sago and those who are against it.”
Though he is himself a fine comic actor, as well as talented writer, Riordain does not feature in the cast of Slattery’s Sago Saga.
“To a certain extent I like to keep my acting and writing separate, but I have a young family as well and touring is a young man’s game!” he notes. “But I’m very very happy with the cast we have. From the original production there’s Darragh Kelly, Lisa Lambe, and Clare Barrett, and they’re joined by Barry Ward and Aengus McAnally.”
Riordain also discloses that he is currently working on a version Peer Gynt for Rough Magic which is due to be staged next year. In the meantime however, the many fans of Flann O’Brien can look forward to his rollicking adaptation of Slattery’s Sago Saga.
Slattery’s Sago Saga will be performed in the Town Hall on Monday November 29 at 8pm. Tickets are €18/15 and are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
