A play by Ireland's most celebrated comic writer, Flann O'Brien, lost for 50 years, has been discovered in the archives of Northwestern University, Illinois, by an American academic. It will be published next week by the Dublin Lilliput Press.
It was known that Flann O'Brien, author of The Dalkey Archive published in 1965 and The Third Policeman (1967), had written a play which was a free adaptation of Karel and Josef Capek's 1921 The Insect Play.
This was inspired by a French entomologist's La vie des insectes. Its target was Henry Ford's world of the assembly line and time and motion studies.
The O'Brien play, Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, was put on in Dublin by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company at the Gaiety Theatre during Lent in 1943 with a cast of 150 - representing millions, as is obligatory with an insect play. But, presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the aspersions it seemed to cast on married life and the superpatriotic Fianna Fail party, it only ran six days and was never again performed. O'Brien died in 1966.
Robert Tracy, Professor of English and Celtic Studies at the University of California in Berkeley, told from his Californian home how he discovered the play: 'I was actually researching performances of Chekov in Ireland,' he said. 'I wanted to get records of the Edwards-MacLiammoir productions, but I was told all the company's papers had been sold to Northwestern University. Going through the index of contents I saw the insect play mentioned.
'I at first assumed this was just the first act, well known by scholars, but you can imagine the thrill when I found they had a full text which was clearly Hilton Edwards's prompt copy.'
The first act of Rhapsody in Stephen's Green was among Flann O'Brien's papers owned by the University of Southern Illinois. But no trace until now had been found of acts two and three and a prologue and epilogue.
The play is in the vein of O'Brien's columns under the name Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the Little Horses) for the Irish Times in the 1950s and 1960s, which played merry hell with his countrymen's pretensions, religious piety, political cant and official ignorance in the use of the English and Irish languages.
The first act deals with the beastly behaviour of bees and act two features avaricious beetles, greedy ducks and dopey crickets with a pronounced Cork accent. Corkmen are traditionally the butt of Dublin jokes.
But it is act three which has fascinating topical resonance. It features a colony of mindlessly driven Orange ants who work themselves into a frenzy against a colony of Green ants until finally their aggression pushes them into suicidal war with Blue ants.
The Orange ants mouth slogans such as: 'The Awnt State will fieght ond the Awnt State wull be rieght!'. They also declare themselves to be 'hord-headed ond ready to fieght for the rieght to keep in stap with the Awnt Empiere'.
The phonetic spelling leaves no doubt that we are dealing with Belfast men. O'Brien, a Catholic, was actually born in Ulster, but spent most of his life in Dublin. His real name was Brian O'Nolan.
Before the Southern audience could become too smug, enter a ludicrous figure known as Deevil, transparently the prime minister Eamon de Valera, who is leader of the Green Ants and ready to march across the border to recover his property, which consists of a dead beetle.
There is no mistaking 33-year-old Brian O'Nolan's bitter disgust with the 1940s world of carnage, greed and cant at home and abroad. But on the literary level the work is rather too parochial and simplistically exuberant to be classed as one of his major works. However it and the context in which it was born - and rapidly snuffed out - gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics.
The Irish Times was complimentary but The Irish Press was sniffy, the critic no doubt aware of the long and oppressive shadow of his proprietor, Eamon de Valera.
But the Catholic Standard was outraged and there were allegations that their critic, Gabriel Fallon, went to the length of trying to influence the Director of the Irish Catholic Boy Scouts to order the boys, doubling as ants and chickens, to withdraw their labour. O'Nolan was accused of presenting 'obscenities and salacities on the Dublin stage'.
We can gauge the tone of the Catholic Standard's criticism by a furious letter to the paper signed 'Myles na gCopaleen': 'We protest very strongly against a dirty tirade which, under the guise of dramatic criticism, was nothing more than a treatise on dung. "There will always be a distinction," Mr Fallon says, "between the honest dung of the farmyard and nasty dirt of the chicken run".
'Personally I lack the latrine erudition to comment on this extraordinary statement, and I am not going to speculate on the odd researches that led your contributor to his great discovery. I am content to record my objection that his faecal reveries should be published.'
Whatever class of dung was involved the play did not make it into a second week and disappeared.