Australian TV Plays: O'Flaherty VC (20 Sept 1967) (Love and War)

The third in Love and War.

Premise

An Irish soldier returns home after winning the Victoria Cross.

Plot

Dennis O’Flaherty, winner of the Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery, has returned home to his local village to take part in a recruitment campaign. In conversation with General Pearce Madigan, the local squire, O’Flaherty admits that he had not told his Fenian mother that he would be fighting for the British side in the war, not against it. Madigan says he must explain to her why the war is being fought, and that even Republicans should help in the struggle against German oppression. O’Flaherty says he’s no idea why the war is being fought, he just joined up to get away from home, but one thing he’s become convinced of is that patriotism is part of the problem: “You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race”.

His mother appears, incensed to discover he’s being fighting for the British. But she’s even more horrified when Dennis’ girlfriend, Teresa, arrives, expecting that the V.C. comes with a large payout in cash. She’s dismayed to learn that the government may only give him a pension if he is wounded first. Still, she thinks it will be worth it, even if he does have to be badly wounded.

Dennis says he’s sick of life in provincial Ireland. Since he’s experienced France, he never wants to come back. He hopes he can get a French wife. Teresa is outraged.

When Mrs O’Flaherty discovers that her son gave Teresa a valuable gold watch, she launches into a tirade and the two women berate each other mercilessly. O’Flaherty says he can’t wait to get back to the peace and quiet of the trenches. General Madigan sympathises, commenting, “Do you think that we should have got an army without conscription if domestic life had been as happy as people say it is?”

Cast

Edwin Hodgeman
Kerry Maguire
Moray Powell
Audrey Teasdale

Original play

It was a one act play by George Bernard Shaw and written in 1915, based on the exploits of real life Irish VC winner Michael O'Leary. The play was meant to debut at the Abbey Theatre but was suppressed. I don't think it was professionally produced until 1920.

A full copy of the text is here.

Introduction by Shaw:

It may surprise some people to learn that in 1915 this little play was a recruiting poster in disguise. The British officer seldom likes Irish soldiers; but he always tries to have a certain proportion of them in his battalion, because, partly from a want of common sense which leads them to value their lives less than Englishmen do [lives are really less worth living in a poor country], and partly because even the most cowardly Irishman feels obliged to outdo an Englishman in bravery if possible, and at least to set a perilous pace for him, Irish soldiers give impetus to those military operations which require for their spirited execution more devilment than prudence.

Unfortunately, Irish recruiting was badly bungled in 1915. The Irish were for the most part Roman Catholics and loyal Irishmen, which means that from the English point of view they were heretics and rebels. But they were willing enough to go soldiering on the side of France and see the world outside Ireland, which is a dull place to live in. It was quite easy to enlist them by approaching them from their own point of view. But the War Office insisted on approaching them from the point of view of Dublin Castle. They were discouraged and repulsed by refusals to give commissions to Roman Catholic officers, or to allow distinct Irish units to be formed. To attract them, the walls were covered with placards headed REMEMBER BELGIUM. The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the Castle: FORGET AND FORGIVE would have been more to the point. Remembering Belgium and its broken treaty led Irishmen to remember Limerick and its broken treaty; and the recruiting ended in a rebellion, in suppressing which the British artillery quite unnecessarily reduced the centre of Dublin to ruins, and the British commanders killed their leading prisoners of war in cold blood morning after morning with an effect of long-drawn-out ferocity. Really it was only the usual childish petulance in which John Bull does things in a week that disgrace him for a century, though he soon recovers his good humor, and cannot understand why the survivors of his wrath do not feel as jolly with him as he does with them. On the smouldering ruins of Dublin the appeals to remember Louvain were presently supplemented by a fresh appeal. IRISHMEN, DO YOU WISH TO HAVE THE HORRORS OF WAR BROUGHT TO YOUR OWN HEARTHS AND HOMES? Dublin laughed sourly.

As for me I addressed myself quite simply to the business of obtaining recruits. I knew by personal experience and observation what anyone might have inferred from the records of Irish emigration, that all an Irishman's hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out of Ireland. Stimulate his loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for her; for, incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England's king. Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape from Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for the Papal States, for secession in America, and even, if no better may be, for England. Knowing that the ignorance and insularity of the Irishman is a danger to himself and to his neighbors, I had no scruple in making that appeal when there was something for him to fight which the whole world had to fight unless it meant to come under the jack boot of the German version of Dublin Castle.

There was another consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped them powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment. The happy home of the idealist may become common under millennial conditions. It is not common at present. No one will ever know how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their amiablest, a holiday from them may be a tempting change for all parties. That is why I did not endow O’Flaherty V.C. with an ideal Irish colleen for his sweetheart, and gave him for his mother a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than a affectionate parent from whom he could not so easily have torn himself away.

I need hardly say that a play thus carefully adapted to its purpose was voted utterly inadmissible; and in due course the British Government, frightened out of its wits for the moment by the rout of the Fifth Army, ordained Irish Conscription, and then did not dare to go through with it. I still think my own line was the more businesslike. But during the war everyone except the soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an extreme assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the smallest regard to their effect on others, could win the war. Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence by keeping my head in this matter of Irish recruiting. What can I do but apologize, and publish the play now that it can no longer do any good?

Other Productions

Shaw read it out over BBC radio in 1925. BBC radio did it in Nov 1968.

It had recently been done on stage in London in 1966 starring Ian Mackellan.

The play was performed at Sydney's AMP Theatre in 1967 as a lunch time presentation. And at the Q Theatre. (I think they were the same).

Production

It was shot in Sydney, I think. John Croyston directed.

Croyston told Graham Shirley in 2004 he remembered using a crane while making it. "We would deliberately contrive something to be different... pushing boundaries."

Reception

TV Times called it "most satisfactory."