How Keano ran and ran
QUESTION What is the longest running play in Ireland? BY general agreement, the theatre production that’s had the greatest success, in terms of length of runs, is I, Keano.
The musical is based on the infamous Saipan incident in 2002 when Republic of Ireland soccer captain Roy Keane and manager Mick McCarthy had a well-publicised bust-up and Keane either walked out or was sent home, depending on who you believe.
The incident inspired three writers – Michael Nugent, Arthur Mathews and Paul Woodfull – to devise the musical, set in ancient Roman times, but based on the Saipan episode. The musical premiered at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on February 8, 2005, and was an immediate success, even with people with no great interest in soccer or the theatre.
I, Keano returned to the Olympia on five occasions, and in 2015, it was revived at the same theatre. The first production of I, Keano ran continuously for four years and apart from the Olympia, it was staged at many other theatrical venues throughout Ireland. It was so popular, and so long-running, that by 2007, it had taken in over €10million at the box office and had been seen by more than half a million theatre-goers.
Statistics on long-running theatre productions in Ireland, on both the professional and amateur circuits, are notoriously hard to come by, unlike the box-office returns for cinemas. Even theatres such as the Abbey are slow to come up with statistics for their longestrunning productions. But having said that, there’s little or no doubt that I, Keano has turned out to be the longest-running production on Irish stages.
There’s only one near rival to the longest-running title. The legendary playwright John B Keane, from Listowel, Co. Kerry, wrote a total of 20 original plays including Sive and The Field.
If all the professional and amateur performances of all of John B Keane’s plays were added together, these would make for the greatest number of theatrical performances, such has been their popularity over the years.
Peggy Sherlock, Waterford. QUESTION Did Jane Austen ever find love? THERE were few authors who could write about romantic love like Jane Austen, yet she was never married.
Many have tried to assign her a romantic history. It was the subject of the 2007 film Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, which weaves a mostly fictional romance around her relationship with an Irishman called Tom Lefroy.
Thomas Langlois Lefroy (17761869) was born in Limerick. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1797, and was the MP for Dublin University from 1830 to 1841, and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland from 1852 to 1866. In 1796 he began a flirtation with Jane, who was a friend of an older female relative.
Jane wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning him. In one she described him as ‘a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man’.
In the other she expresses sorrow at their parting when he had to return to Ireland: ‘At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.’ The dashing Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice, written around that time, may have been based on Lefroy.
While Jane was a romantic writer, her own attitude towards marriage was practical. She often made it clear she saw the benefits of marriage from a financial standpoint. At the time of their meeting, Lefroy was not wealthy – his studies had been sponsored by a granduncle.
In Pride And Prejudice, Elizabeth tells her sister Jane about when she first realised she had feelings for Darcy: ‘It has been coming on so gradually that I hardly know when it began.’ The fact he was wealthy clearly helped: ‘But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’
Jane Austen was briefly engaged to another man, but it was not a love match.
Until 1775, she lived with her family in Steventon, Hampshire, near the Bigg-Wither family of Manydown Park, an ancient manor in Wootton St Lawrence.
A year after moving to Bath in 1801, Jane and her sister Cassandra returned to Manydown to visit their old neighbours. Harris BiggWither, 21, proposed to Jane, then almost 27, on the evening of December 2, 1802.
Jane had no source of independent income and Harris’s looming inheritance appealed, so she accepted him. Following a sleepless night of regret, she fled the estate after breaking it off. She was engaged for less than a day.
Though their brothers married, neither of the Austen sisters did. Cassandra was engaged, but her fiancé, Thomas Fowle, died of yellow fever abroad.
Helen Morrison, Cheltenham. QUESTION Who invented the stethoscope? THE stethoscope was invented in 1816 by René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826), a Parisian physician. Named from the Greek stethos, meaning ‘breast’, and skopein, ‘look at’, it was used to diagnose various chest conditions.
Laennec wrote of his invention in his treatise De l’Auscultation Médiate in August 1819 (auscultation being the action of listening to sounds from the heart, lungs or other organs): ‘I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics... the great distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood on applying our ear to the other.
‘Immediately, on this suggestion, I rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of my ear.’
He noted a stethoscope avoided the embarrassment for a doctor of placing his ear against the chest of a woman patient.
The first models looked like oldstyle ear trumpets and consisted of a wooden tube attached to a single microphone at one end and earpiece at the other. The first mention of a stethoscope with a fully flexible tube was in 1840 by British doctor Golding Bird, who used a single earpiece.
Wexford-born and Trinity-educated physician Arthur Leared invented a stethoscope that fitted into both ears and was first seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. A year later, New Yorkbased Dr George Cammann adapted the binaural design for commercial production. Rachel Saunders, Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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