Morrow and Myles: Local Boys in the Paper

Henry Lawrence ‘Larry’ Morrow was born in 1900 in Belfast. Like O’Nolan, he was raised in a liberal, nationalistic, intellectual, and artistic interfaith Ulster family.³ His six uncles were successful artists, illustrators, cartoonists, and writers,⁴ while his father, Harry Morrow, was a prominent figure in the Irish Revival movement in the north of Ireland, who wrote satirical plays for the nationalist Ulster Literary Theatre, Belfast, under the penname ‘Gerald MacNamara.’⁵ Morrow’s early experience acting in his father’s plays was integral to his later work in theatre and radio production,⁶ even as he claimed that his career trajectory was initially ‘hampered by his father’s “bad” name as the author of some very anti-Orange plays.’⁷

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Morrow drew on his family and Ulster Literary Theatre connections with notable Belfast editors such as James Winder Good and Robert Wilson Lynd to pursue a career as a columnist and reviewer. He first plied his trade at the Northern Whig in Belfast, before relocating to Dublin, where he wrote columns and music criticism for nationalist and anti-partition publications such as the Freeman’s Journal and Irish Statesman. Around 1924, Morrow moved to London, where, over the course of the next decade, he contributed columns to a wide range of publications (including the Daily News, the New Statesman and Nation, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement) and worked as an editor for John O’London’s Weekly and the Manchester Guardian.

Morrow’s regular series of humorous Daily News articles (1925–36) is representative of certain affinities between his and O’Nolan’s journalistic styles. Morrow’s columnist persona shares Myles na gCopaleen’s taste for eavesdropping⁸ and habit of mining humour by commenting pedantically on the phrasing of articles in rival publications,⁹ as well as a proclivity for exhibiting his linguistic dexterity through comically extensive insults.¹⁰ Both columnists write critically about the Irish populace’s own role in the perpetuation of Stage Irish stereotypes: while Myles chastises the Irish tendency to perform the ‘celtic act’ for the benefit of English audiences,¹¹ Morrow reflects that ‘the blame, I’m afraid, must lie with us [Irish]’ for having let the English ‘talk and write nonsense about Ireland for almost 500 years, and we have written a good deal of it ourselves.’¹² While I do not see evidence that O’Nolan read Morrow’s Daily News column, I do observe—in its wry disposition, comic schemes, and observational social commentary—a shared comic tone (loquacious, ironic, performative) that would make Morrow a suitable adaptor of O’Nolan’s writing. Moreover, they share a sensibility as Irish writers from northern nationalist families whose work is nevertheless often mocking of Irish cultural narratives and self-presentations.

Following Morrow’s return to Dublin in 1940 to edit the Irish Digest, he and O’Nolan began moving in the same social and literary milieu. Morrow socialised at the Pearl Bar, Fleet Street, the regular for most of literary Dublin and the local for employees of the Irish Times, where he became a casual columnist.¹³ O’Nolan and Morrow were both contributors to the Bell, with ‘Flann O’Brien’ appearing in the magazine’s inaugural October 1940 edition and Morrow featuring in a special ‘Ulster’ issue the following July;¹⁴ however, Morrow’s involvement with the Bell was more sustained than O’Nolan’s, through the celebrated series of pen portraits and interviews he wrote under the pseudonym ‘The Bellman.’¹⁵ In 1953, Morrow and O’Nolan contributed to a special Statist supplement on ‘The Economy of Ireland.’ Morrow’s piece argued that Irish journalists and editors are ‘among Ireland’s most significant “invisible exports” to Britain during the past two centuries,’ while O’Nolan wrote more cynically that Ireland’s main export was Stage Irish stereotypes.¹⁶

As newspapermen with similar backgrounds and temperaments, it is not surprising that they were personal as well as professional acquaintances in 1940s Dublin. In a May 1942 letter to Abbey actor and set designer Michael Walsh, O’Nolan writes that ‘Larrie [sic] Morrow and Niall Sheridan are muttering about going into production’ on his stage play Faustus Kelly, which he has ‘promised […] to them if their plans materialise.’¹⁷ This scheme did not come to pass, and the play premiered at the Abbey Theatre the following January. Yet Morrow would return to Faustus Kelly almost two decades later in his career second act as a major figure of mid-century English and Irish radio.

From the BBC to RÉ: Morrow’s Radiogenic Aesthetic

In 1936, Morrow began his transition from newspaper to radio work when he was appointed Drama Director at the BBC in London. He was brought into this role by Controller of Programmes Cecil Graves, who issued a new charter that included a mandate to produce more radio plays, features, and actuality programmes that drew on medium-specific ‘devices of presentation […] to catch and hold the attention’ of radio audiences.¹⁸ In his 1934 book The Stuff of Radio, BBC radio pioneer Lance Sieveking asserted, ‘there is no other training or experience comparable to that of a radio producer’;¹⁹ indeed, the experience Morrow gained at the BBC in the ‘art of the microphone’ shaped his radiogenic aesthetic in ways that would come to distinguish him from many of his Irish contemporaries in the 1940s and 50s.

A special section of the BBC’s Drama Department—which included Morrow alongside Laurence Giliam, Felix Felton, M. H. Allen, and John Cheatle—was formed to take charge of feature programmes,²⁰ which treated subjects from history, biography, geography, science, and culture in a well-researched and inventive radio-centred format.²¹ Morrow was a regular script writer and producer for these BBC features from 1936 to 1939, working on historical and cultural topics ranging from George IV’s 1822 visit to Scotland (‘The King’s Muster,’ 3 July 1937) to ‘The Tragic Life of Vincent van Gogh’ (12 June 1937). Morrow’s features followed the BBC house style, which avoided dry historical lectures in favour of dramatic sound designs that situate the audience in a specific spatial-temporal soundscape. For instance, in Morrow’s production of ‘The Last Days of Sail’—a speculative sailing voyage from South America to London, broadcast on 4 October 1936—the action is represented aurally through ‘the rushing of wind through the sails, the creaking of decks, the mewing of gulls, the swish of the sea round the bows.’²² In such productions, Morrow learned the craft of radio ‘keynotes’—namely, sounds linked with certain locales that draw on cultural memory to evoke spatial and temporal structures in the mind.²³

In his role as Drama Director, Morrow also contributed to the BBC’s growing format of actuality programmes, in which recorded sound from real-world locations (interviews, speeches, crowd reactions, ambient noises, and so on) is edited and assembled for broadcast. Indeed, Morrow’s appointment coincided with the BBC’s purchase of a laundry van and two lorries for conversion into mobile recording studios, equipped with long-lead microphones for actuality field recordings.²⁴ In his move from newspaper columnist to BBC features and actuality producer, Morrow followed closely in the footsteps of D. G. Bridson, a freelance writer who joined BBC radio as a Feature Programmes Assistant for their North Region in 1935, where he pioneered the style of actuality feature that Morrow, in part, would be tasked with continuing and expanding in London.²⁵ Many of the actuality programmes Morrow produced in this vein covered significant local and national events, such as the coronation of George VI and Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey (‘Coronation Carnival—A Recorded Programme of Coronation Festivities in London and the Regions,’ 15 May 1937). Asa Briggs details how such actuality programmes (as well as live outside broadcasts) ‘acted as a kind of magic carpet enabling the listener to feel that he was participating in events which he could not attend and which in many cases he would never have been permitted to attend.’²⁶ Briggs’s analogy is intriguing, given that one of Morrow’s most popular RÉ radio series in the 1950s was his Magic Carpet bedtime features, which brought listeners on speculative journeys through space and time through imaginative combinations of voice, music, and sound.²⁷

Morrow’s appointment to the BBC’s Belfast Station in 1938 was lauded by the Irish Times on the basis that he ‘has wide experience of broadcasting at the headquarters in London and knows the Ulster character intimately.’²⁸ In this capacity, Morrow commissioned and produced radio works by emerging Ulster writers,²⁹ and scripted numerous well-received historical features.³⁰ Quidnunc reflected in the Irish Times that while ‘it often is argued that Radio Éireann cannot compete against the great financial and technical resources of the BBC,’ Morrow’s work at the Belfast Station ‘owed its great value […] to its ingenious presentation rather than to any technical devices. This is the sort of thing which the Dublin station should be able to do just as well as Belfast, but does not.’³¹

The following year, Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, the first head of the newly created RÉ Talks Office, was working to engage more writers to contribute material for features and dramatic broadcasting, and O’Nolan and Morrow were among the figures to whom he turned.³² It is in this context that O’Nolan’s first script for radio, ‘John Duffy’s Brother,’ was broadcast on 15 March 1940 as part of Their Funniest Stories, a RÉ series of humorous radio short stories by Irish writers, including Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Lord Dunsany, and Lynn Doyle.³³ Neither the audio recording nor the script survives, although Keith Hopper observes that the RÉ broadcast predates the June 1940 publication of ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ in the Irish Digest, which described the short story as having been taken ‘from a Radio Éireann broadcast.’³⁴ What critics have not noted, however, is that Morrow was the Irish Digest editor at this time, a fact which places him at the nexus of O’Nolan’s literary and radio work already in the early 1940s.

During the early 1940s, Morrow’s voice was becoming familiar to RÉ’s audience through the recurring series Larry Morrow Turns Over a New Leaf, in which he details a year in history (essentially, a proto-version of RTÉ’s later popular series Reeling in the Years), and a series of debates with O’Nolan’s friend and collaborator Niall Montgomery on RÉ’s Pros and Cons programme.³⁵ He also began to write and produce historical features for RÉ, as well as dramatic adaptations of Ulster writing.³⁶ Many structural and programming aspects at RÉ would have been familiar to Morrow, given that they were, in Paul Rouse’s terms, ‘a clear copy of the BBC.’³⁷ However, the resources at the Irish state broadcaster were far from those Morrow had grown accustomed to at the London and Belfast stations. Despite RÉ substantially increasing its dramatic output during T. J. Kiernan’s tenure as director (1935–41), the conditions for producing radio dramas in the early 1940s remained as ‘primitive as they had been in the earliest days’ of Irish radio owing to ‘a debilitating lack of professional’ producers and actors.³⁸ RÉ’s operational limitations were exacerbated by the Second World War, during which ‘the service suffered cuts in transmission hours, staff, and budgets.’³⁹ Nevertheless, the Irish Times’s radio critic described Morrow’s historical features for RÉ in this period as ‘several of the most brilliant scripts ever given to that station.’⁴⁰

It is worth taking stock here of the specifics of Morrow’s radiogenic aesthetic that made him stand out in the Irish radio scene of the 1940s and which informed his approach to adapting O’Nolan’s work for radio in the late 1950s. Given the remarkable number of historical features and radio drama adaptations that Morrow wrote, produced, and presented across his career, three representative examples—one each from his stints at London, Belfast, and Dublin—will have to suffice until a more detailed study of his radio work is available.⁴¹ The first programme Morrow arranged in his position as BBC Drama Director, ‘Last Orders,’ was a fifteen-minute relay broadcast on 24 June 1936 from The Turk’s Head, a riverside tavern on Wapping High Street where it was said condemned men, on their way to Execution Dock, were given their last drink and which was closing its doors for the last time, having been declared redundant. Distinct from either features or pre-recorded actuality programming formats, Morrow devised the broadcast in a fly-on-the-wall format in which a microphone was placed at the inn’s door to relay live—using the BBC’s mobile broadcasting equipment—the sounds of conviviality, the recollections of the pub’s regular characters, and, at 10:30, the last occasion on which the publican, Mr Love, would call ‘time’ on his clientele.⁴² The format was praised by the Belfast News-Letter as ‘an example of what radio alone can do,’ reflecting that the ‘idea behind it, to make contact with actual life at an interesting point, should be used as the basis for many similar programmes.’⁴³ In this regard, the broadcast adapts the proclivity towards eavesdropping evidenced in Morrow’s column writing to radio-specific ends via the microphone. As Neil Verma notes, eavesdropping—listening in on conversation—was commonly considered by radio practitioners in the 1930s and 1940s to play to the medium’s specific strengths for producing intimacy and effect (much as the cinematic ‘art of the camera’ was associated with voyeurism).⁴⁴ Yet reviewers noted the novelty of Morrow’s choice of setting, with the Daily News spotlighting the class connotations of his decision to have the ‘BBC microphone stray into the public bar’ as a departure from the broadcaster’s standard ‘atmosphere […] of caviar and cocktails.’⁴⁵ Morrow’s early use of radio technology to capture the atmosphere and soundscape of a working-class pub would be relevant experience for his later radio adaptation of O’Nolan’s Thirst.

In his Irish Times review of ‘Linen: The Story of a Great Ulster Industry’ (BBC Belfast, 5 November 1938), Quidnunc foregrounds Morrow’s compelling framing and presentation of historical material for radio. Rather than ‘a straightforward […] story of linen,’ the broadcast was supposed to have been heard by ‘travellers in a liner entering Belfast Lough,’ with the comments and diverse accents of the ‘listeners’ (the northern linen workers and flax-growers, the ship’s English passengers, and ‘the smooth tones of the announcer’) giving the production ‘variety’ and ‘an amusing quality.’⁴⁶ Verma uses the term ‘audiopositioning’ to refer to ‘the place for the listener that is created by coding foregrounds and backgrounds’ through ‘audio composition and components of dialogue,’ noting the practice’s particular utility to analyses of ‘1930s radio, which tended to audioposition with great care, even upending source texts to do so.’⁴⁷ Here, Morrow audiopositions the audience within a specific spatial-temporal and class-coded soundscape through a structure of embedded eavesdropping, in which the auditor listens in on the travellers, who, in turn, listen in on the diverse accents and accounts of a broad cross-section of people who work in the linen industry.⁴⁸ These techniques feature in each of Morrow’s three O’Nolan adaptations for RÉ, especially in the comic dynamism achieved through the variety of the passengers’ accents in ‘Something in the Air.’

A few years later, the Irish Times’s radio critic praised Morrow’s RÉ radio script about the Earl of Bristol in similar terms. The broadcast opens with a train stopping at stations for the Hotel Bristol in Paris, Marseilles, Nice, Genoa, Florence, and Napoli, leading the passengers to wonder how so many Bristol Hotels were scattered over Europe. ‘I do not believe,’ the critic reflects, ‘that anybody except Larry Morrow would have had the radio sense and imagination to have introduced his script in this way.’⁴⁹ Different from both Belfast historian T. W. Moody’s sober ‘history neat’ approach and the ‘poetic drama’ of Belfast poet W. R. Rodgers, who wrote scripts for the BBC’s Third Programme,⁵⁰ Morrow is praised as ‘the master’ of a third type of broadcast: ‘history devised as radio-variety.’ The implication is that his experience at the BBC had allowed Morrow to develop a radiogenic aesthetic that was attentive to the craft of radio atmospherics, intimacy, and audiopositioning in ways that were missing from other Irish radio writers and producers of the time, who tended to present straight sound recordings of a stage play, poetry recital, or history lecture. What set Morrow apart from his contemporaries in Irish radio in the early 1940s, then, was a conceptual understanding of the medium-specific aesthetic, structural, technical, and material limitations and possibilities of radio as a form of popular art.

‘I might make a radio play out of it?’: RÉ Productions Director (1947–51)

Having left for England around 1943 to join the Air Ministry and work as editor of the London Transport Board’s wartime publications, in 1947 Morrow relocated again to Dublin, where he officially converted to Roman Catholicism. His return to Irish shores was welcomed in Cruiskeen Lawn, where Myles writes that ‘judging from an item on the Radio Eireann recently, the man from God knows where, i.e. Mr Larry Morrow, is back in Dublin, though he has not yet called on me or sent the customary parcel.’⁵¹ Myles relates that he was ‘much taken with’ Morrow’s return RÉ broadcast, but nevertheless lampoons the physics underpinning its ‘ridiculous and impossible plot’ concerning a man who siphons whiskey out of a nearby warehouse into a tap in his own home, regretting that Morrow and RÉ ‘never get me to vet these things in advance.’⁵²

Following the appointment in March of Robert Brennan as RÉ Director, the summer of 1947 marked a major shake-up at the newly renamed General Features Office,⁵³ including Morrow’s appointment as Productions Director. Nichevo celebrated the appointment of ‘a most remarkable person’ to a post that ‘will give him plenty of scope for that imaginative genius which he possesses in such a high degree’ and predicted that ‘Dublin’s radio and artistic life will be enriched by his return to his native country.’⁵⁴ In the following weeks, Ó Faracháin was appointed Controller of Programmes, and Francis MacManus replaced him as Director of General Features. Seán Mac Réamoinn and Séamus Ennis were appointed to the newly formed Outside Broadcasting Unit, which gathered interviews, music, and other documentary sound materials for radio features with a specially equipped recording van. The Irish Times’s radio critic lauded this new creative line-up, declaring ‘it is not easy to visualise better choices.’⁵⁵ Myles joined the chorus of praise for the appointments, predicting that Brennan ‘is going to do a first-class job’ based on the fact that he has ‘a grand staff, and now Larry Morrow and Francis MacManus on top of them.’⁵⁶ MacManus’s appointment perhaps brought to O’Nolan’s recollection their shared history on Irish radio, having briefly alternated slots on a book review show broadcast by Radio Athlone in 1935.⁵⁷ However, it would be his relationship with Morrow that would shape O’Nolan’s engagements with Irish radio over the next thirteen years.

In his four-year tenure as Productions Director, Morrow worked to increase the production of plays on the state broadcaster, soliciting and commissioning more original scripts by Irish writers composed specifically for radio. Benedict Kiely recalls, ‘Larry went around asking people who were supposed to be able to write to, for God’s sake, write him plays he could produce on radio, and offering a fair sum of money for a tolerable effort.’⁵⁸ Myles took an interest in the campaign, joking in August 1948 that RÉ ‘is again disgracing itself’ via ‘Mr H. L. Morrow[’s]’ assertion that the Irish ‘cannot even write plays!!!,’ and suggesting that, rather than a dearth, RÉ was suffering from a deluge of mediocre submissions.⁵⁹ Undeterred by Myles’s shouts from the sidelines, Morrow brought in playwright Brinsley MacNamara to help him evaluate plays submitted for broadcasting purposes,⁶⁰ and he held a national radio drama competition, for which he vetted over a hundred entries. Despite his ribbing, Myles took a keen interest in the cosmopolitan sensibility Morrow brought to the largely conservative and often censorious RÉ. This dynamic is staged ironically in a 1948 instalment of Cruiskeen Lawn, in which Myles imagines a scene of Ó Faracháin rejecting a submission by Ireland’s ‘national bard’ Thomas Moore: ‘No, Tom, the stuff has promise, Larry likes it, […] but … it’s not native, see?’⁶¹

Morrow’s efforts were greatly advanced by the establishment of the RÉ Repertory Company in August 1947, which provided his productions with a professional troupe of nineteen actors contracted exclusively to RÉ, essentially as civil servants.⁶² The company was recruited by Ó Faracháin (who had overseen the project’s conception and development since 1942) and Ria Mooney (the founder of the Abbey Experimental Theatre Company who had played Mrs Crockett in the 1943 Abbey production of Faustus Kelly), with Mícheál Ó hAodha serving as its first producer.⁶³ Morrow worked closely with the actors, and performer Ronald Ibbs declared the company’s ‘complete faith in our producer Larry Morrow.’⁶⁴ The reviews were positive, with the Irish Times’s radio critic noting that Morrow’s name on RÉ radio play production credits was ‘a fair guarantee of worthwhile entertainment,’⁶⁵ and Nichevo asserting that Morrow ‘already has improved the broadcasting programmes almost beyond recognition.’⁶⁶ C. E. Kelly, Brennan’s successor as director of broadcasting, reported that RÉ ‘broadcast more plays in 1948 than in any previous year, and that these were presented with better production and finish’ than in any other period in the broadcaster’s history.⁶⁷ By the end of that year, Myles was identifying himself in his Irish Times column as a regular listener to RÉ.⁶⁸

Morrow’s elevation to a prominent figure in Irish public and cultural life is marked by his appearance in several Cruiskeen Lawn instalments. In April 1948, Myles reports comically on his supposed stand-up row with Winston Churchill in the British Commons over the Hugh Lane paintings. As the assembly descends into chaos at Myles’s provocation ‘How about giving us back our pictures?,’ the piece concludes with ‘Mr Larry Morrow’ leaving the press gallery, reflecting to himself, ‘I must remember to write an article about this scene. […] Or dammit, I might make a radio play out of it?’⁶⁹ Here, Morrow is presented as a key mid-century documenter of Irish artistic and historical life through his journalism and radio work, and Myles’s flights of fancy are suggested as material that he could profitably adapt to radio; however, there is also a political dimension in these two Ulster writers bearing witness to Britain’s colonial plunder of Irish cultural artefacts. In April 1948, Myles groups Morrow with a series of contemporary Ulster artists and essayists, including James Sinton Sleator, William Conor, and Denis Liddell Ireland,⁷⁰ while a January 1949 instalment of Cruiskeen Lawn situates Morrow in the more international and transhistorical company of Erasmus, Stendhal, Flaubert, and George Moore.⁷¹ A month later, Myles compares the ‘majestic and stimulating’ corpus of Irish letters positively against the canon of British literature, citing the examples of both ‘H. L. Morrow’ and ‘myself’ alongside more canonical Irish writers.⁷² Evidently, Morrow is at the forefront of Myles’s thoughts in these years as a prominent and popular artist at the heart of Irish social life whose work connects Ireland’s northern and southern cultural spheres to a tradition that is distinct from British culture.

Of course, it might also appear that Myles is attempting to elevate his own cultural stock through the association with Morrow, and in further columns he plays up the comparisons, even presenting the pair as Doppelgängers. Myles feigns concern that his and Morrow’s voices are starting to become indistinguishable, when—mid-rant against the fashion for radio quizzes—he reflects, ‘heavens, I am beginning to write like Larry Morrow!’⁷³ In March 1948, Myles relates that he is ‘not surprised to see Mr H. L. Morrow copiously referring to me in print’; although Morrow’s article in question is ostensibly about the writer A. J. A. Symons, Myles asserts that ‘nobody would for a moment be deceived—for his descriptions of me are exact.’⁷⁴ The gag’s familiar structure—Myles’s narcissistic assumption that all published writing is ultimately about him—culminates in the ironic assertion that it is in his surreptitiously concealed portrait of Myles that ‘one senses the soundness of Morrow as an observer of great men.’⁷⁵ Thus, Myles foregrounds his own career trajectory as a model for Morrow’s, rather than vice versa, and asserts his position as master to Morrow’s apprentice. In August 1949, Myles complains that he cannot find a writer in Ireland willing to take on his biography. In a variation on the previous gag, he feigns to pass off some passages on Pascal as descriptions of his own life, before dropping the conceit:

‘Myles na gCopaleen is certainly like many other great writers, far more widely known than he is read or appreciated—’

I can’t go on because many famous names now come tumbling into my head—Larry Morrow, Austin Clarke, Bob Farren [Roibeard Ó Faracháin], Sean O’F, Seamus, setra setra—and it is probably clear to all that I am altering a text to suit my book.⁷⁶

Myles implies that the lives of ‘great men’ are interchangeable to the point that a description of Symons or Pascal is equally applicable to other great yet underread and underappreciated artists such as Myles, Morrow, et al.⁷⁷ Another element connecting the group that Myles gathers in this passage is their prominent involvement in 1940s Irish radio.

By the mid-1950s, after he had left his role as Productions Director, Morrow turns up in Cruiskeen Lawn less as Myles’s contemporary, Doppelgänger, or rival, but increasingly as an intimate friend. An instalment titled ‘To Morrow’ opens with the acknowledgement that his readers ‘may think this article is dedicated to Mr Larry Morrow, the eminent radiologist. I really did not mean that in devising the title, but I do not withdraw the good wish that is implied.’⁷⁸ Elsewhere, Myles identifies ‘Mr Larry Morrow’ as ‘a friend of mine with a three-cornered mind,’⁷⁹ and indeed O’Nolan’s regard for Morrow’s achievements continued into the 1960s, when he advised the poet Leslie Daiken, ‘keep it up and you’ll soon be as big as Larry Morrow.’⁸⁰ Accounts of Morrow’s personality reveal what likely appealed to O’Nolan about his company, as he is remembered as a great ‘talker’ whose ‘forte was anecdote’ but who was ‘seldom a bore.’⁸¹ Yet it is hard to escape the sense that the proportionally high number of columns referring positively to Morrow in these years were intended, at least in part, as a campaign to advertise Myles’s association with him and to draw Morrow’s attention to O’Nolan’s writing as a worthy candidate for adaptation and broadcast on RÉ.

‘Make It a Double’: Production Histories

Both during and after Morrow’s tenure as Productions Director, O’Nolan pitched several radio projects and scripts to RÉ and directly courted Morrow’s interest in producing his work for radio.⁸² In November 1950, O’Nolan proposed ‘four programmes (varying in length from 20–30 minutes)’ to Morrow, who responded with interest, although the correspondence suggests that these four unidentified radio scripts had not yet been written.⁸³ In July 1953, Séamus Kavanagh (the Assistant Productions Director who had joined RÉ in 1947 as programme assistant under Morrow)⁸⁴ wrote to O’Nolan to ask ‘if [he] could compile a short series of programmes from the scripts [he] wrote for Radio Éireann early on.’⁸⁵ O’Nolan responded with a pitch for a show titled ‘Cluiche Cliché’—which Kavanagh ‘like[d] very much’ but was ‘at a loss to know how it should be presented’—and an unidentified short story, which Kavanagh also liked but suggested would need to be ‘vastly reduced’ if RÉ were going to dramatize it.⁸⁶

Having been informed by Kavanagh of O’Nolan’s interest in writing scripts for RÉ, Ó hAodha (Morrow’s successor as Productions Director in 1951) wrote directly to the author in October 1956 to ask him to submit ‘light stuff,’ in Irish or English, ‘in dialogue form.’⁸⁷ Ó hAodha emphasises this last point three times in his letter, which suggests to me, in combination with Kavanagh’s previous responses, that while RÉ were interested in producing O’Nolan’s writing, the material was not being submitted in a radio-appropriate form. Ó hAodha outlines three concrete options for O’Nolan to pursue:

1. a dramatization of his short stories (emphasising the need for them to be adapted for radio and to contact MacManus to initiate this process);

2. a dialogue based on An Béal Bocht;

3. a radio adaptation of Faustus Kelly.

On this last point, Ó hAodha adds, ‘it is clear that [the play] could not be adapted by anyone except the author who would have to re-write it in radio form,’ which I understand as flattering O’Nolan while underlining that a submission of the theatre script would not be sufficient. Given that this is six years into his concerted push to have his work broadcast, it is evident to me that at this point O’Nolan is coming up against a limit regarding the knowledge or experience necessary to adapt his writing adequately for radio broadcast; yet Ó hAodha’s letter marks a turning point in O’Nolan’s relationship to RÉ, as these projects start to be handed over to expert radio adaptors who manage to get them on the air. Proinsias Mac Aonghusa’s radio adaptation of An Béal Bocht was broadcast on RÉ from December 1957 to January 1958; and while Ó hAodha suggests that only O’Nolan could adapt his theatre work for radio, these projects, including Faustus Kelly, were realised by Morrow.

Although no longer Productions Director, Morrow continued to write, produce, and present features, radio drama adaptations, and arts magazine programmes for RÉ throughout the 1950s. These included his popular series Magic Carpet, Wednesday Magazine, and That’s How It Started; notable features on Irish cultural history, most prominently ‘Hilton and Micheál’ (1958) on the Gate Theatre’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammoir, that featured the voices of the two subjects alongside those of Orson Welles, Coralie Carmichael, Daisy Bannard Cogley, Denis Johnston, and C. P. Curran;⁸⁸ numerous radio dramas, such as his production of Robert Rietti’s English translation of Dario Niccodemi’s Serenade at Dawn (broadcast 4 April 1954); a series of historical and literary features targeted at schoolchildren and Intercert students that he wrote, produced, and presented for Séamus Kavanagh, then Head of Children’s Programmes; and ‘The Bloom of the Day,’ a feature on James Joyce’s Ulysses broadcast on 16 June 1954, the same day O’Nolan et al. undertook the first Bloomsday pilgrimage. In a review of ‘The Last Bohemian’—Morrow’s ‘lively and colourful account of’ Irish dramatist W. G. Wills (author of A Royal Divorce)—Ray O’Day reflects, ‘What an asset to Radio Eireann is “Larry” Morrow […] with his magic voice and his vast erudition.’⁸⁹ This period also saw Morrow undertaking more theatrical direction and production work,⁹⁰ leading Michael Monks to wonder at his ‘astonishing versatility and ability,’ which ‘continue to make him one of the personalities of Irish radio.’⁹¹

Likely inspired by the author’s pitches to him and in consultation with Ó hAodha, in 1958 Morrow began a project to adapt two short pieces by O’Nolan—Thirst and ‘Flight 13’—for a half-hour RÉ broadcast titled ‘Make It a Double.’ In October 1958, James Plunkett wrote to O’Nolan in his capacity as RÉ Assistant Productions Director to thank him for his permission to use Morrow’s adaptations and to offer him a fee of £10, writing separately to Morrow to offer him £15 for adaptation and production and to fix rehearsal and production details.⁹² However, plans for ‘Make It a Double’ were altered when the script submitted for ‘Thirst’ was almost twice as long as required, and it was realised that it alone would fill the thirty minutes scheduled for the broadcast. Plunkett wrote to make O’Nolan a renewed offer of ‘£10 for the right to one broadcast of “Thirst”,’ with the caveat that ‘in the event of our being able to programme “Flight 13” at a later date we will make a separate offer.’⁹³ O’Nolan took the contract but complained about RÉ’s ‘contemptible’ standard of pay, protesting that while he does not ‘expect BBC rates,’ the offer of ‘£10 for 25 minutes of original work for an audience of perhaps two million is so far below the pay standards of Ireland’s Own or Our Boys that I will not again offer you material on any such basis.’⁹⁴ However, O’Nolan ultimately stepped down from this position, and Plunkett wrote to him on 27 December 1958 to confirm the payment of £10 for the author’s rights in one broadcast of ‘Flight 13,’ again making a separate, larger payment to Morrow ‘for his adaptation for radio.’⁹⁵

‘Thirst’ was broadcast on 14 November 1958, starring Thomas Studley as the publican and Eamonn Kelly as the Sergeant, and again on 2 March 1959, for which O’Nolan was paid a rebroadcast fee of £7.10.0. ‘Flight 13’ was broadcast on RÉ on 16 January 1959 under the revised title ‘Something in the Air.’ Based on the success of these broadcasts, Morrow next adapted Faustus Kelly for radio. Morrow was at this time back working for the BBC in London, and a version of his script produced by Frank Dermody (who had directed the 1943 Abbey stage production) was broadcast on 31 January 1960 on RÉ. Again, O’Nolan and Morrow were contracted and paid separately for permission and adaptation respectively.⁹⁶ RÉ rebroadcast ‘Faustus Kelly’ on 14 May 1960 and 26 January 1963; in anticipation of that third broadcast, O’Nolan published a short article in the RTV Guide reflecting on his original play and the Faust myth.⁹⁷ On 21 August 1966, RÉ broadcast a re-recorded version of Morrow’s script with a new cast and with Sean Cotter as producer. It is conceivable that O’Nolan and Morrow collaborated in some undocumented way on some or all three of these radio adaptations, but given the explicit detail of Plunkett’s correspondence that O’Nolan and Morrow were paid separately for permissions and adaptation work respectively, the extant evidence suggests that Morrow alone is responsible for adapting and arranging these works for radio.

These three RÉ productions survive in different states. For ‘Thirst,’ we have both Morrow’s script and an audio recording of the broadcast, while for ‘Something in the Air’ and ‘Faustus Kelly,’ we have only Morrow’s script.⁹⁸ The original scripts of O’Nolan’s two stage plays have been published, enabling direct comparison with Morrow’s radio scripts; however, it is unclear whether the original text of ‘Flight 13’ that Morrow adapted as ‘Something in the Air’ is a draft script or treatment for theatre or radio or an unpublished short story—although it is certain that Morrow’s radio version predates O’Nolan’s published but unproduced television script ‘Flight.’⁹⁹ With these limitations established, I want to consider these productions’ extant materials to evaluate how Morrow applies his BBC-trained radiogenic aesthetic to the task of adapting these three O’Nolan texts, paying attention to both their limitations and possibilities for radio. More specifically, given that the source stage works are focused on dialogues and monologues in static locations—and not soundscapes in shifting locations, as would best fit his approach to radio—Morrow’s task is to discover the radiogenic qualities of O’Nolan’s theatrical scripts.

Adapting O’Nolan for Radio

The radio scripts for ‘Thirst,’ ‘Something in the Air,’ and ‘Faustus Kelly’ exhibit a comic and tonal sensibility that Morrow and O’Nolan share going back to their newspaper days, with Morrow’s dialogue even more garrulous and his scenarios more fantastical, in certain cases, than O’Nolan’s original scripts. Thematically, all three radio scripts foreground a certain derision towards Irish self-presentation and amplify an interest in postcolonial tensions that are present in O’Nolan’s texts. These include the antagonism between the bloviating Irish politician Kelly (who lambasts both the English destruction of Irish ‘national interests’ and Irish ‘knavery, corruption and governmental incompetence’) and his Irish-Anglo rival Shaw in ‘Faustus Kelly,’ or the tensions between the drunken Irish Captain and the Hibernophobic English passenger in ‘Something in the Air,’ in which the damaged and failing aeroplane indexes postcolonial Ireland itself (‘This flight we’re on doesn’t take much more than eighty minutes. […] But how about the Eight Hundred Years? Not a word about that’).¹⁰⁰ And while O’Nolan’s theatre script for Thirst leaves it more-or-less implicit that the publican Coulahan was deployed in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I as part of the British Mesopotamian campaign (‘fighting for small nationalities,’ in his words),¹⁰¹ Morrow’s radio script makes this context explicit when Coulahan informs the Sergeant that he needs ‘one last bottle of stout […] after thinking about me days as a soldier out in Mespot—when I was misguided enough as a young lad to serve under the British Crown.’¹⁰² Morrow makes many such cuts, changes, and additions large and small to his source material in the process of adaptation; however, my intention here is not to catalogue these in detail—although I hope the present article will provide the necessary context and grounding for this future work—but rather to spotlight specific moments that are exemplary of Morrow’s technical and conceptual approach to adapting O’Nolan’s writing to the medium-specific demands of contemporary radio practice.

Each broadcast is opened by a RÉ announcer who states the play’s title, author (‘Myles na gCopaleen’), and adaptor (‘conjured-up for radio by Larry Morrow’), and ascribes a descriptive subtitle to the piece: ‘Something in the Air’ is presented as ‘a drama of the skies,’ while ‘Thirst’ is ‘a moral tale mainly for moral people,’ and ‘Faustus Kelly’ is ‘a modern morality play.’¹⁰³ These framing descriptors are notably ironic, creating expectations for drama and elevated moral themes which are undercut by the plays’ comic and decidedly amoral handling of intoxication, corruption, and necromancy. Each broadcast sets the tone through an opening musical cue. Reflecting that they were originally conceived as a double feature—and perhaps with the idea that they might thus be paired in future broadcasts—‘Thirst’ and ‘Something in the Air’ open and close with the traditional jig ‘The Irish Washerwoman,’ arranged and played by Fred Hartley, Head of BBC Light Music in the 1940s. For ‘Something in the Air,’ the Scottish composer’s light, cheerful arrangement establishes the listener’s expectations for comedy, but in the case of ‘Thirst,’ the soundtrack then cross-fades to tense, ‘eerie music.’¹⁰⁴ These two contrasting musical cues situate the play in an atmosphere somewhere between comedy and tension that is the piece’s hallmark. The ‘eerie music’ plays under a third-person omniscient voice, performed on microphone by Morrow, who does not return after he has situated the listener in the bar and apprised them of the scenario.

VOICE: (Slightly sinister) […] It is set in a public-house—a Dublin public house where Mr Ignatius Cornelius Coulahan,—publican—is purveying liquor to two somewhat sad-and-seedy looking gentlemen in the back part of his candlelit licensed premises. (lowering voice)—It is late at night… v e r y late at night… in fact, quite a little while after closing-time…The title, I repeat, is—[gulps] ‘T H I R S T’ (this with relish).¹⁰⁵

As we have a complete audio version of ‘Thirst,’ we can evaluate, at the level of technical execution, how Morrow’s spoken introduction works to transform stage action into a radiophonic form by situating the audience within a certain atmosphere and soundscape and creating the sense of eavesdropping on an intimate but tense and conspiratorial scene. Morrow’s introduction establishes this atmosphere not only through the language used but also through performance choices regarding volume (hushed), tempo (slow), tone (sinister), and delivery (with intermittent gasping and swallowing sounds) in combination with the ‘keynotes’ of ambient pub sounds, such as clinking glasses, muttering, laughing, and sipping.

Beyond the setting, there are numerous details which are communicated visually, kinetically, and without dialogue in O’Nolan’s stage plays that Morrow is required to adapt into radiophonic form. At certain moments in ‘Thirst,’ for instance, Morrow introduces dialogue to make explicit what the taciturn Sergeant is doing, as Coulahan’s escalating narrative of his unquenchable thirst in Mesopotamia is interspersed with asides, such as ‘Begob, Sergeant, that’s a powerful lot of notes you’re taking down in your little book?’ and ‘Would you quit writing in your note-book, Sergeant, till I tell you.’¹⁰⁶ The play’s conclusion, when the Sergeant finally relents to his growing thirst and wordlessly knocks back the pints of stout that have been left out for him on the bar—thus forcing him to drop the after-hours drinking charges—is transformed into monologue in Morrow’s adaptation:

SERG.: (as if glaring, terrified, into the mike—banging a bottle on the counter): Begor, Mr Coulahan, you have me bet! Bet to the ropes. You can have me notebook, pencil and all.¹⁰⁷ (sound of pages [torn] from notebook)—hand me them two, would ye? […] (still closer)—And if there’s a third one, I’ll polish it as well! (We hear him gulping a glass of malt, then banging the glass on the counter. He smacks his lips; then does the same to the second glass, smacks his lips even more appreciatively this time, bangs glass on the counter and does the same with a third).¹⁰⁸

In his production script, Morrow indicates that the Sergeant should perform his lines somewhat ‘off-mike’ for the majority of the play—thus audiopositioning the auditor in proximity to Coulahan—and deliver this last speech directly on microphone for greater immediacy and impact. Indeed, I find the radio play’s pay-off more performatively affective than any stage production of Thirst I have seen, to the extent that radio’s ability to situate the listener in intimate proximity to the acousmatic sounds of the Sergeant gasping, panting, smacking his lips, swallowing, and gulping is, to my experience, more visceral of the embodied feeling of thirst than a visual-kinetic performance can convey.

In his 1955 letter encouraging O’Nolan to adapt Faustus Kelly for RÉ, Ó hAodha notes that ‘the Devil would have to take a more “active” part in a radio version!’¹⁰⁹ To adapt the play’s preliminary deed-signing—performed on the stage in dumbshow—for radio, Morrow composed new dialogue so that the audience hears the devil’s voice orchestrating Kelly in signing the contract which will consign his soul to him:

DEVLIN: After me, Kelly … Say after me … I swear—

KELLY: ‘I swear’ …

DEVLIN: By hell and Lucifer—

KELLY: ‘By hell and Lucifer’ …

DEVLIN: To effect all promises—

KELLY: ‘To effect all promises’ …

DEVLIN: Between us made—.¹¹⁰

Morrow’s script includes actor performance prompts—Devlin is instructed to deliver his lines ‘in style of Demon King,’ in reference to the archetypal pantomime villain—alongside technician sound cues—a heightened, dramatic atmosphere is created by the soundscape, which begins ‘with whining wind blasted heath effect’ and culminates with ‘storm effects’ following Kelly’s signing of the deed in his own blood, cross-faded with the flighty and fast ‘Mercury’ movement of Gustav Holst’s 1918 orchestral suite The Planets.¹¹¹

G. A. Olden’s review of the original 1960 RÉ broadcast reflected that ‘it was good fun to hear again Myles na Gopaleen’s satirical study of Irish public life.’¹¹² Olden praised Morrow’s adaptation for ‘the authentic flavour of a rural council meeting—its glorious inconsequence […] and the speed with which the suspicions of political opponents are aroused.’¹¹³ Indeed, Morrow makes a number of deep cuts to act 1 of O’Nolan’s theatrical script, removing all of Reilly and Cullen’s opening dialogue about the entwined dangers of motorcars, women in trousers, and Stalin’s Russia to come more quickly to the commencement of the council meeting. These cuts have the effect of excising references which had become outdated in the 1960s Ireland in which Morrow’s adaptation is set (as evidenced by references to then taoiseach Seán Lemass),¹¹⁴ but also of streamlining the auditory information to maintain a clear communication of place, purpose, and dramatic escalation to the audience. However, Olden also suggests that ‘the radio performance couldn’t possibly match the original Abbey production[’s] […] purely visual comic effects,’ lamenting in particular the loss of Reilly’s ‘sheepish return’ to the meeting in act 1 ‘after his angry exit in somebody else’s hat.’¹¹⁵ Morrow compensates for these lost visual gags with an increased supernaturalism, enabled by radio’s lack of physical restraints: while the theatre script has Kelly and The Stranger straightforwardly enter the council chamber through a door at the outset of the meeting, in Morrow’s radio adaptation Kelly appears suddenly and miraculously like ‘a ghost.’ Devlin’s apparition is indicated by ‘an electronic plink-plonk-z-z-z’ sound effect,¹¹⁶ and Kelly’s ghostly apparition is communicated through Shawn’s testimony that he was suddenly in the room ‘like the Demon King in the panto.’¹¹⁷ Olden’s comparison of the radio adaptation against his memory of the Abbey stage performance and Morrow’s prompts for the audience to relate the devil to the pantomime Demon King both bear out Richard Hand’s observation that radio adaptations rely ‘on audiences whose experiences with other media make them co-creators of the experiences radio offers.’¹¹⁸

Morrow’s ‘Faustus Kelly’ carries over almost verbatim the devil’s closing montage of quotations that summarises the hypocrisies of Irish political life; yet the process of turning a visual-kinetic staging into an audio collage produces a different effect. In O’Nolan’s original theatre script, Kelly departs the stage, and the devil returns in a green spotlight, wearing the ceremonial black robe from the opening dumbshow, and mimics the recorded voices of the play’s characters, that are relayed over a speaker, for the audience’s benefit;¹¹⁹ in Morrow’s adaptation, the devil directly addresses Kelly, with new dialogue that sets up the montage as being for his benefit, and anchors the coming audio collage for the listener’s clarification: ‘You and your friends know all the answers to all the questions. The trouble is that they don’t know the questions. Just listen to yourselves!’ The collage of character dialogue from the play is presented with sound effects to distinguish audially between temporalities in the radio format, as ‘the voices fade in and out very quickly and are all slightly warped and echoing.’¹²⁰ Morrow deploys this effect as an aesthetic choice in act 1, when Cullen reflects that Chairman Kelly is ‘late for his own meeting’ and remarks sardonically on the chairman’s hypocrisy:

CULLEN: D’you remember the night he went for me for being late?

VOICE OF KELLY: (Disembodied, exaggerated, with slight echo): Am I to understand, Councillor Cullen, that you desire to have your name recorded as having been present at this meeting?

CULLEN: ‘Don’t exert yourself talking, Mr Chairman,’ says I, ‘till you get your breath—because them stairs would kill a horse.’ (Laughs appreciatively).¹²¹

Since all voices on the radio are ‘disembodied’ in the sense of being acousmatic, this direction scans as a performance prompt combined with a technical one (‘with slight echo’), intended to signal to the listener that when Kelly is speaking these words, he is both spatially and temporally absent from the scene. The effect adds variety to the static theatrical scene (in which the actor playing Cullen merely mimics Kelly’s voice) by shifting back-and-forth between different spatial-temporal soundscapes (between memories and current action) in a way that is nevertheless immediately comprehensible to the listener.

‘Something in the Air’ cannot be analysed as an adaptation without access to the original source material. However, certain differences between Morrow’s radio script and O’Nolan’s later unproduced teleplay ‘Flight’ are exemplary of the former’s radio craft, particularly in his focus on combining voices, music, and sound to produce atmosphere, tension, and comedy. The radio script begins with an air hostess’s announcement of the Air Skylark plane’s improbable route of Dublin to ‘London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona and back be the way of Borris-in-Ossory and Maguire’s Bridge,’ to which a Ballymena-bound passenger declares, ‘I only travel this way because the route is cheaper.’¹²² The majority of the radio play’s opening is taken up by anxious dialogue between two Dubliners, Mac and Charlie—in proximity to whom the listener is audiopositioned—about the ‘ominous’ detail that the route is the unlucky ‘Flight 13.’ O’Nolan’s later teleplay cuts this opening material in its entirety, including the whole aspect of the flight’s unlucky number which gave the original material its title. The teleplay begins on page three of the radio script, more or less proceeding in the same way from the Dubliners’ observation that the plane’s captain appears to be flying under the influence. Whether this opening material is all Morrow’s original writing, or it exists also in some fashion in the previous form of the text from which Morrow adapted his radio play, the effect of these excisions is to remove from the teleplay the radio script’s more absurdist and fantastical elements: the invented Air Skylark, the impossible route, the implication that the plane’s misfortunes, as its engines fail and propellors plunge into the Irish Sea, are, in some part, supernatural in nature. Another notable distinction is that the dialogue in Morrow’s radio script is more verbose and heightened, while in O’Nolan’s teleplay it has been streamlined and made more natural. For instance, compare the closing punchline in each version, when the Englishman rushes off the crash-landed plane to attend his business appointment, believing himself to be in London. The radio play ends with the Captain laughing, ‘Not far from London! There’ll be right ructions, I’m thinkin’, when he finds out he’s in NEW…TOWN…MOUNT…KENNEDY—NEW…TOWN…MOUNT…KENNEDY …… and the bona-fides shut!’; in the teleplay, the Captain’s line reads, ‘There’ll be right ructions when he finds he’s in Wexford—eh lads?’¹²³

O’Nolan’s television script is played straighter than Morrow’s earlier radio script at the levels of register and tone. More significantly, the comedic effect that comes through in Morrow’s radio script is in the chaotic cacophony of voices in a variety of accents (Dublin, Ulster, English, American) and sound effects (escalating sounds of the plane lurching, sputtering engines, glass shattering, screaming passengers, explosions, and ‘terrific commotion’) in contrast to the Irish Captain’s nonchalant responses to the plane falling to pieces mid-air. The effect here is resonant with the approach I noted in Morrow’s earlier features, in which ‘keynotes’ and diverse accents allow for audiopositioning and produce atmosphere, variety, and intimacy. We do not have access to the audio recording of ‘Something in the Air,’ but I think we can have some idea of the effect of the script’s description of the soundscape of the plane’s final crash as a comic release after the escalating cacophony of screaming voices and sounds of engine failure:

EXCITED VOICES: (shouting) We’re coming down…… Coming down!

(EFFECTS: THE NOSE-DIVE SOUND REACHES PEAK. CREEP IN THE LAPPING OF WATER. IN DISTANCE A GULL OR TWO. VERY DISTANT A SHIP’S SIREN OR A FOG HORN. […] PADDED DOOR IS BANGED UNMISTAKABLY. HURRIED FOOTSTEPS APPROACH.)

CAPTAIN: (approaching, excitedly) Didn’t I tell ye Rafferty would do it [i.e., glide the plane to a crash-landing without engines or propellors]?¹²⁴

I am not saying that a skilled director couldn’t have made the crash compelling on the television screen, if O’Nolan’s teleplay had been put into production, but I am suggesting that the teleplay’s direction ‘there is a terrific crash and tearing sound, followed by confused shouts’ does not capture the skilled manipulation of the medium to create rising tension and comic release that Morrow’s radio script displays. Here, I suggest, we see a demonstration of Morrow’s assured familiarity, after more than two decades in the business, with contemporary ideas about the best radio practice that O’Nolan evidently lacked in his attempts to put his work on the air.

Conclusion: Myles’s and Morrow’s After Hours

At the peak of his output in the early 1950s, Morrow was celebrated in Ireland as a ‘scintillating wit, essayist, and radio producer.’¹²⁵ He was still remembered in the 1970s as one of RÉ’s ‘best contributors—distinctive, sharp, and […] recognisable.’¹²⁶ The Irish Times’s 1971 obituary lauded Morrow as ‘one of the best known broadcasters in Ireland in the late forties and early fifties’ and proclaimed that his ‘mastery of the art and craft of broadcasting’—evidenced in his expert manipulation of the ‘radio raw materials’ of speech, music, significant sound, and silence—‘was at times lit by something like genius.’¹²⁷ Yet, today, he does not have a dedicated entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, let alone in Wikipedia.

Ironically, these years of Morrow’s most sustained engagement with O’Nolan’s writing (1958–60), which make his radio work most visible and compelling to contemporary O’Nolan scholars, marked the beginning of his decline as a cultural force. In May 1959, Morrow returned to London to work with the BBC, where he found the ‘entire landscape, as far as Radio is concerned,’ much changed, writing to Séamus Kavanagh that ‘everything is factual and up-to-the-minute. Anything in the way of historic features (except the ultra-highbrow stuff on the Third [Programme]) is “out”.’¹²⁸ Morrow’s forte of the charismatic, middlebrow, history-as-radio-variety format had been replaced by straighter and drier forms of documentary and news reporting, and he found himself, suddenly, a man out of his time.¹²⁹ Perhaps this awareness of the shifting media landscape was part of Morrow’s motivation for collaborating with O’Nolan on a television adaptation of Thirst, which he sold to BBC Television in November 1958 and which was broadcast as ‘After Hours’ on April Fools’ Day 1959. The broadcast was well received in the Irish and British press, who positively contrasted the authentic Irish working-class atmosphere that O’Nolan and Morrow brought to their subject with the BBC’s more common Stage-Irish handling of such themes. Yet Morrow did not pursue a career third act in television; rather, in the 1960s, he largely left broadcast media to work for the PR firm Toby O’Brien.

In the same month that Morrow moved back to London, May 1959, Timothy O’Keeffe persuaded O’Nolan to republish At Swim-Two-Birds with the London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, leading to the revival of Flann O’Brien’s cultural cachet as a novelist. The following year, O’Nolan successfully pitched ‘“The Cruiskeen Lawn”: Something Old and Something New from Myles na Gopaleen’ to RÉ, who broadcast the half-hour radio programme on 21 July 1960.¹³⁰ Now writing his own radio scripts without Morrow’s assistance, he was paid an increased fee of £15.¹³¹ O’Nolan sent the production script for ‘After Hours’ to Hilton Edwards following his appointment as the first Director of Drama of Telefís Éireann (TÉ) in 1961, advising, disingenuously, that Edwards ‘need not pay attention to Larry Morrow’s name or intervention’ as ‘his real function was to know somebody in the BBC TV offices.’¹³² A half-hour television adaptation of Thirst aired on TÉ in the broadcaster’s first week in 1961,¹³³ leading the way for O’Nolan’s two TÉ sitcoms, O’Dea’s Yer Man (1963–64) and Th’Oul Lad of Kilsalaher (1965).

This trajectory appears, at first blush, to bear out James Plunkett’s enthusiastic 1959 letter to O’Nolan concerning his and Morrow’s ‘After Hours’ television project, noting the play’s ‘wonderful possibilities for that medium.’¹³⁴ And yet, despite a handful of examples, O’Nolan’s writing has rarely been adapted for television,¹³⁵ while radio has been a sustained site of innovative interaction with his work to the present day. We think here of the metaleptic chaos of Eamonn Morrissey’s RTÉ radio series Myles Apart (1979–80); Eric Ewens’s and Maurice Leitch’s high-profile BBC radio adaptations of O’Nolan’s major novels and columns in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ewens worked with Morrow in London in the late 1950s);¹³⁶ and a series of creative twenty-first-century radio features on O’Nolan.¹³⁷ Each of these peaks of radio adaptation marked a revival or transformation in O’Nolan’s public and critical standing. Yet in this transitional moment for both of their careers at the turn of the 1960s—in which Morrow’s star was fading, while O’Nolan’s was rising, again—it was Morrow’s radio adaptations that established the parameters, contours, and viability of O’Nolan’s medial afterlife.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.