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Fear Of Big Words And
Love Of The Words Of John B.
“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking.” (I had to throw that in.)
Anyway, when encountering a big word while reading aloud I’m
always afraid that I will pronounce it wrong. That fear is classed as a
social phobia. And I only discovered recently that there is a word for
the fear of big words. Here it is;
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Try pronouncing that one.
Speaking of words. There are very few people on this green
and misty island who haven’t seen “Sive” by John B. Keane. A rural drama
about a young and beautiful girl who lives with her uncle Mike, his
wife Mena and his mother Nanna. And there is hardly a parish hall on
this island where it hasn’t been staged. But where did it all start?
One night, sixty four years ago, 30 year old John B. went,
with his wife Mary, to the Listowel Drama Group’s production of All
Souls Night by Joseph Tomelty. On the way home he said to Mary, “I could
write as good a play as that.” On arriving home he reached for his
favourite Biro. By 6.30 next morning, as dawn was breaking over
Gurtenard wood and footfall was starting in Market Street, he had
completed Scene One of Sive. A fortnight later he had finished the
first draft, he showed it to a few close friends and, as if with one
voice, they told him that it wouldn’t work. He was given different
reasons by different people; the names of the characters were
ridiculous. The theme was outgrown. The language was too flowery. He
re-wrote it and submitted it to the Abbey Theatre. The script was
returned to him without any comment.
It was first staged by the Listowel Drama Group in Walshe’s
Ballroom, Listowel on February 02nd 1959. They later put it on in the
Abbey Theatre for one week. (When the Abbey Company eventually produced
the play in 1985 it ran to packed houses for 42 weeks.) John B. said,”
They got the harshness, the bitterness, the poverty of the period . . .
At long last a few elderly and semi-elderly playwrights are getting
*Cothrom na Feinne “). There was an Off-Broadway production but
John B. was probably more impressed when the Listowel Drama Group won
the All- Ireland Drama Final in Athlone with it.
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Listowel people who visited Leinster House as the guests of Dan Moloney TD after their victory in Athlone in 1959
When the group was touring north Kerry with the play the
playwright was playing Carthalawn, the singing tinker. He gave an
unforgettable performance in Ballylongford. One unscripted scene drew
mixed reactions from the audience. As the slender John B. was about to
leave the stage at the end of Act two, gently singing what should have
been the curtain-line, “And they laid her dead, to bury in the clay,”
there was a wardrobe malfunction. His borrowed trousers, which were
several sizes too big for him, headed towards Australia. Despite
frantic, whispered, instructions to “get off ye eejit” he stood his
ground. Most actors have adlibbed at times but this was different.
Without missing a beat John B. composed an additional verse to the theme
song, in seconds, and sang it with his trousers around his ankles
before his exeunt stage left. Do you know how many times Sive has been
staged? Neither do I but in 2018, the year that that he was nominated
for Kerry Person of the Year, John B’s son Billy, put out a call
on RTE radio asking any actress, amateur or professional, who played
Sive at any time in the previous fifty-nine years to make contact.
The search resulted in an assembly of 50 “Sives” in the
Gaiety Theatre on Sunday 11th February 2018. They ranged in ages from . .
. Well! This national gathering of Sives met each other over a cup of
tea in the John B. Bar and had a group photograph taken on the Gaiety
stage. The group included Margaret Ward who played Sive in that very
first production
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I have read the script of Sive many times; both the three act
version and the later two act version. I have now just finished one with
a difference. Sive is published by Mercier Press with introduction and
commentary by John B’s daughter Joanna. The word “commentary” doesn’t
fully describe her input. She expands on the description of every
character which is given in the stage directions and analyses each of
those multi-layered characters who show every emotion to which human
beings are heir. It is as if every one of them has the benefit of a
psychoanalyst’s report. She explains in detail the imagery and language
which was still alive in North Kerry when the play was written and set,
quoting her father who said, “The North Kerry dialect was the
love-child of two languages –Elizabethan English and Bardic Irish.” He
said much the same to me when I interviewed him for a radio programme
the year before he died when he was in constant pain. He told me that he
certainly would not have been a writer if he hadn’t been introduced to
the people in “the land of Dan Paddy Andy” as a ten year old in 1938.
“I was introduced to new people and a new language.”
While he admitted that people are entitled to talk anyway the
like, (he supported the Language Freedom Movement, when it was founded
in 1966) he went on to say that in his time with the people of the
Stacks Mountains, “I never in all my years – even now- heard the four
letter word used. Although he was always a champion of free speech, (he
backed the Language Freedom Movement when it was founded in 1966)he
went on to say, ” . . . I think it sounds wrong . . .People who have
God-given speech and literacy that they can’t think of something better
than that “F” word.”
Joanna points out her father’s fairness when she says that
he, .” . . .does not overtly condemn the Catholic Church in the
play but rather subtly brings to light the dominant, controlling
influence this powerful bastion brought to bear on Irish life at the
time.” It couldn’t have been put better. I have yet to meet a person
with a more balanced view of the Catholic Church in Ireland, than the
late John B.
Earlier this year Joanna ,who is an English teacher and was
four times Chairperson of Listowel Writers’ Week was dismissed along
with her fellow veteran members when the voluntary committee was “unceremoniously disbanded without explanation”
on foot of a consultant’s report which recommended restructuring . The
“restructuring” took place and resulted in a 2023 festival which
wasn’t a patch on any of the 51 Writers Week festivals which went before
it and a lot of bad feeling in Kerry and beyond.
“The rapturous rat-a-tat-tat of his typewriter will stay with
me forever,” Joanna says. It is not the only thing that stayed with
her. His influence had the same effect on her as the people of Stacks
Mountain had on him. It made a wordsmith of her .This publication
is described as “suitable for both Senior and Junior cycle classes” but
I believe that no actor, director or producer involved in a future
production of Sive should stage it without reading this revealing work.
See you in October.
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