Moving Healy from the page to the stage

DamianMcCarney

When it was published in 2011 Dermot Healy’s novel ‘Long Time, No See’ attracted some controversy as literary critic Eileen Battersby gave it a terrible review.

“Slow moving and complacent, and at times dangerously relaxed,” was The Irish Times writer’s verdict on this “difficult” book.
Seething author Eugene McCabe lashed out in Healy’s defence on the Times’ letters page in an alarming attack on Battersby’s own creative writing efforts, describing them as “Stunningly bad”, and an example he uses in workshops on how to avoid writing “Shite and onions”.
Having utilised a Joyce-powered insult the Clones writer concluded: “That this person has the temerity to sit in negative judgement on one of the great masters of Irish writing should not pass without comment.”
 

Beautiful

For Damien O’Brien, Healy’s final novel is up there with his best.
“I just thought it was brilliant,” enthuses the Hacklers drama group director. “His novels are so, so different. The Goat’s Song is the one that gets the most recognition in terms of popularity, prose, but for me ‘Long Time, No See is a beautiful wonderful work.
That novel was the most devisive because it was a complete change of his prose style,” he acknowledges.
One of Battersby’s main gripes was that it was “excessively long”. Surprisingly, amidst the negative points, she finds common cause with O’Brien. “There is a great deal of dialogue and detailed descriptions of arrivals and departures. It could be easily adapted for the stage,” Battersby observed in her review.
That’s exactly what O’Brien took from reading it too, thus the Hacklers have resumed their love affair with the work of their foundering member Dermot Healy by adapting the Long Time No See for the stage. Still a work in progress they will do a read through of act one in the Abbey Bar as part of this Friday’s Culture Night celebrations.
 

Delicate

The drama group’s last outing was a performance of Healy’s quirky, heart warming, and delicate play ‘On Broken Wings’ last year. The success of that production emboldened O’Brien to leaf through Healy’s back catalogue for their next project. In ‘Long Time, No See’ he found echoes of On Broken Wings’ in its “quite simple characters”.
Damien adds: “The language is very similar, it’s not just as abstract or absurd. Set in the west of Ireland it has all the issues of a small community.”
The novel’s blurb describes it as a story “about family love and bonds across generations... an epic in miniature, peopled by a cast of innocents and broken misfits.”
In adapting the novel of 450-or-so pages, O’Brien has wielded the editor’s blade mercilessly, removing entire scenes and peripheral characters to distil it down to a “concise and coherent” play.
Healy’s Ballintra hippies are out, likewise a Polish mechanic, and ditto an old woman who lives in a big house, and many more besides.
He’s focussed in on the storylines of just six of the cast of characters: the main protagonist is the teenager Mister Psyche, his Uncle Joe-Joe, his Malibu swilling elderly friend The Blackbird, Psyche’s parents, and girlfriend all join the cast. Psyche has endured a traumatic event a year previous, and further drama is brought to bear as a gun shot is mysteriously fired through the window of Joe Joe’s home, which O’Brien notes, “turns the novel into a kind of thriller”.