Myles ahead

Myles Dungan used to be the sworn enemy of Eamon Dunphy, at least in the sense that Dungan’s Five Seven Live show on RTE was the programme Dunphy set out to beat with his Today FM show The Last Word. He never succeeded. But nowadays Dungan is the lynchpin of RTE’s Rattlebag, successor to The Arts Show. And lord almighty is he happy with the gig? Especially when it comes to interviewing the likes of Bill Wyman about his book, Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey.

“He’s so passionate about the history of the blues and I’ve always been into rock music, especially the blues, so it was a sheer delight talking to Bill,” Dungan explains. For anyone who doubts his credentials as an Arts correspondent, Dungan also reminds us that he was the co-founder of the Dublin Film Festival and has been writing and involved in amateur drama “for the past 25 years.”

A time not wasted, it now transpires. Because, apart from co-writing the novel Snuff seven years ago, Myles had secretly been working on an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It is currently being staged by Joe Devlin’s Rattlebag Theatre company – not connected to the radio show – at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght.

“I love Jane Austen and my favourite Jane Austen book is Pride And Prejudice – but that’s been done to death,” he explains.”My second favourite is Emma but Storyteller’s did a production of that. So my third favourite was Mansfield Park and that’s what I choose. But this is far more than a scissors and paste job, on my behalf. There is virtually no dialogue in Mansfield Park. And where there is, there are speeches that are about a page and half long, which just doesn’t work on stage so while retaining the characters and, hopefully, the context of the novel, I did my own take on the way I imagine these characters would talk. Ninety-five percent of the dialogue in this adaptation is mine.”

Writing dialogue is Myles Dungan’s forte, he has long since realised. He’s “not so great” on narrative, he admits.

“When I was writing Snuff, I’d sent my puerile efforts at narrative to my co-writer, Jim, and he would basically laugh!” says Myles. “And it took me a while to realise that narrative required a little bit more than just descriptions. But I am aware of my weaknesses. In much of what I write I tend to have characters just standing around talking to each other. Rather than fucking doing things they are talking at each other. That is a fault of somebody who likes to write the sound of his own voice.”

Given that Dungan originally did this adaptation for an amateur acting group and later workshopped it with the likes of Michael Colgan, Alan Stanford and Barry McGovern at the Gate Theatre, no doubt there was a plurality of voices ready to tell him where the play was going wrong. And they did. All of which helped “immensely” says Myles.

“I sent it to Michael Colgan and he probably said ‘not another fucking Jane Austen!’ then gave it to Alan and Alan worked on it with me for nearly two years. And we had a private reading, which was marvellous.

”And someone like Barry was great because, we went for a drink after the reading and he said the character he was playing ‘fizzled out’, that I needed to give him more of a place in the second act. And Barry was right. So I did that.”

But the Gate didn’t pick up the option, right?

“They said nothing, basically,” Myles responds. “Though Michael made an astute observation at the end of the reading and he said that the two central characters in the play were too close to the characters in the novel and they were very boring! So on the strength of that I went off and rewrote. Pulled out characters, combined characters, edited, the lot. And I know Joe Devlin, so he came on board and liked the adaptation. Then he made a few suggestions, about the structure of the play, so I reworked it again.”

And all this work involved “not a penny payment” for Myles Dungan. “Though I may earn something if someone from, say, Andrews’ Lane, wishes to stage it,” he says. But what Myles Dungan earned from this experience is less important than what he learned.

“It was a great experience,” he says. “And out of it all I went off and wrote another play that is completely my own and I’ll be doing an amateur production of it in Mullingar in a few weeks. So none of this was a waste of time. It really was a huge learning process.”