John B. Keane: the publican who wrote the plays the Abbey would not take

In 1959 the Abbey Theatre read a play called Sive, sent in by a publican from Listowel, and turned it down. Ernest Blythe, the Abbey's managing director, rejected it outright. It was not the first Keane play the national theatre had declined, and it would not be the last — five of them went back in the post.

So the Listowel Drama Group put it on themselves, in a ballroom in the town.

Church Street, Listowel

John Brendan Keane was born on 21 July 1928 on Church Street in Listowel, County Kerry, the fourth of nine children. His father William was principal of the national school at Clounmacon; his mother Hannah Purtill came from a small farm at Ballydonoghue and had been active in Cumann na mBan and the Gaelic League.

He was, by his own account, expelled from school several times — "for smoking, speech-making, ballad-writing, and play-acting." He worked buying fowl, then as apprentice in a chemist's shop. In the early 1950s he took the emigrant boat and spent about two years in Northampton, labouring, writing at night. He came home, worked as a pharmacist's assistant in Doneraile and in Listowel, married Mary O'Connor in January 1955, and with their combined savings bought a pub: the Greyhound Bar at 37 William Street.

He never left it. He wrote upstairs in a room over the bar, often late into the night after closing, and he came down to work in it by day. That arrangement is the whole explanation of his ear. A publican in a Kerry town hears everything — the boasting, the bargaining, the grief, the courtship, the land disputes — and hears it in the actual words people use. "It was a beautiful, unique language," he said of the speech around him, "neither English nor Irish."

He put it on stage more or less unaltered, and that was the problem.

Sive

Sive is about an orphan girl in a cottage, and a matchmaker, and an old farmer with money, and the family who decide to sell her into that marriage. It is not a gentle play. The producer of the first production worried that it might be "too strong for the more sensitive in the audience."

It opened in early 1959 at Walsh's Ballroom in Listowel and then went out on the amateur drama circuit through Clare, Kerry, Cork and Limerick, and something unusual happened. Tickets went on the black market in Killarney. Gardaí were needed to manage the crowds at the Father Matthew Hall in Limerick. The Kerryman reported in March 1959 that "the house was full and the doors were locked half an hour before the curtain went up." The adjudicator at the Clare festival called it the greatest contribution to the Irish amateur movement in a decade.

In April it won the All-Ireland Amateur Drama Festival at Athlone. On 25 May 1959 the Listowel players brought it to the Queen's Theatre in Dublin — then the Abbey's temporary home after the fire — and became the first English-speaking amateur company to perform in the national theatre. Six performances. Siobhán McKenna, who saw it, called it "the most exciting play I had seen in a long time," and praised "the characters, the language and the absolute honesty."

The play the Abbey had rejected reached the Abbey's stage anyway, carried there by a drama group from a town of three thousand people.

The Field

The Field opened at the Olympia in Dublin in 1965, with Ray McAnally as the Bull McCabe and Keane's own brother Eamonn as the Bird O'Donnell. Its subject is land, and a man prepared to kill for a field he has rented for years and cannot buy.

It is usually linked to a real case. In November 1958 a bachelor farmer named Moss Moore vanished from Reamore, about fifteen miles from Listowel, after a long dispute with a neighbour over a boundary fence that each of them kept moving. His body was found nine days later, beaten, hidden in a ravine near his cottage. A neighbour was suspected; the Director of Public Prosecutions found insufficient evidence and no one was ever charged. The community boycotted the suspected man for the rest of his life. His relatives have always maintained he was innocent and that the killer was never found.

Keane never mapped the play onto the case, and the play is not a documentary. But he was living fifteen miles away, behind a bar, in 1958, and the play is about what a townland does with a killing it has opinions about.

Jim Sheridan filmed it in 1990 with Richard Harris as the Bull. Harris was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he did not win — Jeremy Irons took it that year for Reversal of Fortune.

The rest of the shelf

He was prolific to a degree that is easy to underestimate. Sharon's Grave in 1960. Many Young Men of Twenty in 1961, on emigration. The Highest House on the Mountain, The Man from Clare, The Year of the Hiker. Big Maggie opened at the Cork Opera House in January 1969, with Marie Kean creating the part of a widow determined to hold what is hers against everyone; it reached Broadway in 1982. Moll in 1971.

Alongside the plays came the Letters books, comic epistolary novels each written in the voice of an Irish type — Letters of a Successful T.D. in 1967, and a run of others through the 1970s: the parish priest, the matchmaker, the country postman, the love-hungry farmer, the publican. They sold enormously. Then the novels: The Bodhrán Makers, Durango, The Contractors; and a memoir, Self-Portrait, in 1964.

Trinity College Dublin eventually took in roughly half a ton of his manuscripts, including some twenty-five to thirty thousand letters.

The Abbey changes its mind

It took a while. The Abbey did not begin producing his work regularly until 1978, when Joe Dowling took over as artistic director. Its own first production of Sive did not open until 1985 — twenty-six years after Blythe sent it back — and ran forty-two performances, revived the following year, and again in 1993.

In 1998 the Abbey gave him its highest honour, the Gradam medal. A later artistic director described the original rejection as one of the theatre's more infamous. He was a member of Aosdána, president of Irish PEN, and held honorary doctorates from Trinity and the University of Limerick. Of all of it, the award he said mattered most was Kerry Person of the Year, in 1990: "It is from the county I love."

He died at home on William Street on 30 May 2002, aged seventy-three, and was buried in the old cemetery in Listowel. On the way, the hearse paused outside the pub.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography puts his achievement better than a summary can: what Keane did "was to articulate a culture in transition, catching its brutality, melodrama, and semi-paganism and yet presenting its perennial larger themes and evoking its timeless humanity."

He remains the most performed Irish playwright of the twentieth century, and Sive — the play nobody in Dublin wanted — the most performed thing he wrote.

On the wall

See the John B. Keane art print, or browse the full Irish Writers collection — Heaney, Yeats, Joyce, Behan, O'Casey and Beckett. Archival paper, framed or unframed, made to order, free worldwide shipping.