Is that your bike, Mr. O'Brien?
Is that your Mr. O'Brien bike? is a biographical radio play by the German writer Albrecht Behmel about the Irish author Flann O'Brien .
content
Brian O'Nolan, as O'Brien was called, used a variety of pseudonyms for his novels. In the radio play, these fictional characters encounter the characters from O'Nolan's novels and lead through the work in dialogues, roughly following the writer's biography - from his time as a student in Dublin and Cologne, to his work as a ministerial official in Ireland, to his unemployment during the interwar period and the Irish Civil War and its eventual literary success.
As a leitmotif, a poem by O'Nolan runs through the radio play.
"'' If everything just goes wrong, no matter what you do, and nothing seems to work anymore, when life is as black as the hour of the night, A PORTER IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND." "
Mention is made of the influential influences on O'Nolan's work and life: Marcel Proust , Oscar Wilde , Graham Greene , James Joyce , Fionn mac Cumhaill , Homer , Jonathan Swift , George Bernard Shaw , the Marx Brothers , Brendan Behan , Éamon de Valera , Karl Kraus and Erwin Schrödinger . Surreal conversational situations arise on scientific and theological topics such as the first cause , eternity , atomic physics , bicycles and book handling, but also on the functioning and social effects of modern higher education.
Genre and stylistic devices
The radio play bears the programmatic subtitle "A radio play collage from the world of science and the booze" and is a hybrid of biography, literary retrospective and literary history satire and university satire. Comical effects arise from the recurring use of original sound (falling into the moat, slaps in the face, equipment), musical interludes and dialogical parallel constructions of the various narrative voices.
Cast and direction
- Narrator: Hüseyin Cirpici
- Flann O'Brien: Martin Engler
- Speaker 1: Udo Thies
- Speaker 2: Ernst August Schepmann
- The common Irish people: Peter Penewsky
- Director: Nikolai von Koslowski
Production data
- Production: Saarländischer Rundfunk, 2003
- Playing time: 52 minutes
- First broadcast: September 21, 2003, 3:04 p.m.
Awards
- Radio play of the month , September 2003
"Albrecht Behmel's collage on the life and work of the Irish poet Flann O'Brien captivates with the refreshing nature of the storytelling - whereby the widespread clichés about Ireland's residents (melancholy and heavy alcohol consumption) are ironically broken and polished up so disrespectfully that a sparkling, captivating listening experience is created. In doing so, it is quite possible to make the tragedy of Flann O'Brien clear in addition to his stunning joke - without any superficiality. "
- Nomination for the Audience Award Radio Play Award , 2003
Literary templates
- In swimming-two-birds. Translated by Harry Rowohlt and Helmut Mennicken. Haffmans, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-251-20071-2 .
- The third cop. Translated by Harry Rowohlt. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-518-01446-3 .
- The barmen. Translated by Harry Rowohlt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-518-01529-X (also as Irish curriculum vitae).
- From Dalkey's archives. Translated by Harry Rowohlt. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-01623-7 .
further reading
- Cronin, Anthony. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien, 1989.
- Levinson, Julie, “Adaptation, Metafiction, Self-Creation,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture . Spring 2007, vol. 40: 1.
Web links
- Brian O'Nolan Papers, 1914-1966, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center
- '100 Myles' & 'The International Flann O'Brien Society'