John Bull's Other Island

John Bull's Other Island
Written by	George Bernard Shaw
Date premiered	1 November 1904
Place premiered	Royal Court Theatre
Original language	English
Subject	An English businessman charms Irish villagers into mortgaging their homes
Genre	satirical comedy
Setting	A village in Ireland

John Bull's Other Island is a comedy about Ireland, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1904. Shaw himself was born in Dublin, yet this is one of only two plays of his where he thematically returned to his homeland, the other being O'Flaherty V.C.. The play was highly successful in its day, but is rarely revived, probably because of so much of the dialogue is specific to the politics of the day.

The play deals with Larry Doyle, originally from Ireland, but who has turned his back on his heritage to fit in with the English and Tom Broadbent, his English (and very Machiavellian) business partner. They are civil engineers who run a firm in London. They go to Roscullen, where Doyle was born, to develop some land.

Doyle has no illusions about Ireland while Broadbent is taken with the romance of the place. Broadbent, a lively man who seemingly is not always aware of the impression he makes, becomes a favourite of the people. Before the play is over, it is clear he will marry Nora Reilly, the woman waiting for Doyle (who is more than happy to let her go) and become the area's candidate for Parliament after Doyle refuses to stand, but has also 'called in' all his loans given "so easily" to the locals against their homes and intends (as he had planned all along) to make the village into an amusement park.

Another major character is the defrocked priest Peter (Father) Keegan, the political and temperamental opposite of Broadbent, who sees through him from the beginning and warns the locals against him.

The play was commissioned by W.B. Yeats for the opening of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, but Yeats rejected it as too long and too difficult to produce. He claimed that no actors were available who could do justice to the part of Broadbent. Peter Kavanagh suggests that Yeats' real reason was dislike of Shaw's style of playwrighting: "at this time Yeats and Synge did not feel that Shaw belonged to the real Irish tradition. His plays would thus have no place in the Irish theatre movement. John Bull's Other Island was a play about Ireland but not of it. Furthermore, Shaw's plays were mostly argument, and Yeats particularly detested this quality in dramatic writing." Shaw himself commented the play was written at the request of "Mr William Butler Yeats as a patriotic contribution to the Repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre. Like most people who have asked me to write plays Mr Yeats got rather more than he bargained for...It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland."

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