Michael Scott (director) with Bernie McHugh during her audition for The Valley of the Squinting Windows at Mullingar Arts Centre.

‘Ireland is not that different now from MacNamara’s time’

The lust for gossip and begrudgery that inspired Brinsley MacNamara to write The Valley of the Squinting Windows more than a century ago still exists in Irish society today, according to the playwright given the task of adapting the novel for the stage.

While MacNamara, whose real name was John Weldon, set the story in the fictional midlands village of Garradrimna, its characters bore more than a passing resemblance to his neighbours in his native Delvin, so much so that a celebratory public reading in the town quickly turned into a book burning session when people noticed the similarities.

The fallout from the novel was so severe that people boycotted the local school where MacNamara’s father taught and his family were eventually forced to move out of the town, never to return.

Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner in Mullingar Arts Centre last Tuesday, acclaimed playwright and director Michael Scott said that while the novel deals with universal themes, such as revenge and man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man, he understands why MacNamara’s fellow Delvin people were so enraged.

“He was quite naughty because he was young [he was 28 when the book was published] and I don’t think he hid his source material as well as he could have. It was a little bit exposed. I’m not surprised people were pissed off. He was careless.

“I don’t think he intended to hurt anyone but he was young and careless and a bit of rascal. It backfired badly on him and his family.”

The social and technological changes of recent decades mean that in many ways the Ireland of 2019 is unrecognisable to the one in which MacNamara lived and wrote. Scott, however, believes that the double standards of people in authority and other societal faults that so enraged the writer still exist.

“We don’t call them members of the gentry now, they are businessmen or politicians. They may have different names but they are the same things. The rich businessman does not want his son or daughter marrying the poor girl from nowhere. It still exits.

“It is a universal thing, though. It’s a play that could be happening in Russia, in Serbia, in Poland; anywhere that has a rural community that’s not ‘the big town’. And the big town is not that different either, because they break down into small communities and they become their own little valleys.”

The Valley of the Squinting Windows (the novel) has a large cast of characters and a convoluted plot. It has taken Scott 12 months to adapt the novel for stage and at the time of writing this article, he still had a little bit of work to do on the script. It hasn’t been without its challenges, but he has enjoyed the process, he says.

“It’s taken me nearly a year to do it because I have been very forensic in working out what story that I need to tell.

“I mulched a couple of characters together into one person because in the book you are 10 pages from the end and there still new people being introduced. It’s a big landscape of people and I’ve made it really down to about 20.

“I was also very conscious about not wanting the language of the play to give the impression that the people were stupid because they said things like ‘’tis’. It had a vernacular that was a little old-fashioned, so I’ve renovated quite a bit of the language, not into something that is modern and digital but into something that’s not quite specifically from that part of the past.

“Also, in the book there are a lot of characters that don’t really speak – there is narrated stuff about what they are doing and thinking but they don’t have any dialogue. So I’ve written dialogue for people and I’ve given those characters their own phrasing and syntax so you get the differences between them.

“... Mercifully everyone who has read the script has loved it, so I have been breathing a sigh of release.”

The production, which begins its six-day run in the arts centre with a preview on Monday November 18, incorporates modern technology into the set. Scott says that the use of devices such as a digital wall on which audience members’ faces will appear, will “make them click-in in a modern way to a story that’s old”.

“It’s taking the past and dragging it screaming into the Instagram world and the world of Facebook Live. It’s called The Valley of the Squinting Windows. It’s about watching and all of these social media things are about watching. Everybody is watching everybody else. It’s about intrusion. It’s about having your life ripped into the public domain without you consenting to it.”

When asked what kind of novel Brinsley MacNamara would write about a small rural town today, Scott thinks it wouldn’t differ hugely in tone from The Valley of the Squinting Windows.

Despite the liberalisation of Irish society in the last 20 years, the thirst for gossip remains as strong today, he says.

“I don’t think it’s changed that much in small towns. I accept that now it’s on social media where people slag each other off, so they don’t necessarily do it face to face. I think social media has become something that can be just as dreadful as gossip.

“I don’t think people are interested if people are gay or lesbian, or if they are not married and have 25 children. They don’t care about that any more, largely. They are still interested in what’s going on though.”