The Valley Of The Squinting Windows by Brinsley MacNamara

“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 taken me nearly a year to do it because I have been very forensic in working out what story that I need to tell. It hasn’t been without its challenges, but he has enjoyed the process, he says. 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. The Valley of the Squinting Windows (the novel) has a large cast of characters and a convoluted plot. And the big town is not that different either, because they break down into small communities and they become their own little valleys.” 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’. The rich businessman does not want his son or daughter marrying the poor girl from nowhere. They may have different names but they are the same things. “We don’t call them members of the gentry now, they are businessmen or politicians. Scott, however, believes that the double standards of people in authority and other societal faults that so enraged the writer still exist. 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. It backfired badly on him and his family.” “I don’t think he intended to hurt anyone but he was young and careless and a bit of rascal.

I’m not surprised people were pissed off. “He was quite naughty because he was young and I don’t think he hid his source material as well as he could have.

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.

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. 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 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.

The Valley Of The Squinting Windows by Brinsley MacNamara