McNamara, Brinsley (John Weldon) (1890–1963), novelist and playwright, was born 6 September 1890 at Ballynacor, Hiskinstown, Co. Westmeath, the eldest son of James Weldon, a schoolteacher, originally of Ballinea, Mullingar, and Fanny Weldon (née Duncan). John attended his father's school at Delvin until he was eighteen, and the relationship between father and son was to remain rather formal and strict. His grandmother Duncan encouraged an artistic side first manifested in a series of satiric sketches of local people, and his grandfather was a fund of stories. The local 1798 centenary commemoration sparked Weldon's first awareness of a severe contrast between the ideals of political nationalism and the petty squabbles of Irish small-town life. Stimulated by the visiting fit-up theatrical companies and of news from Dublin of the Abbey Theatre, in September 1908 he took the lead in a local staging of a political melodrama, ‘Robert Emmet’ by Henry C. Mangan. The following summer he left for Dublin, ostensibly to become a civil servant but in fact to audition as an actor at the Abbey Theatre.
He adopted the pseudonym ‘Brinsley McNamara’, the first name deriving from Richard Brinsley Sheridan (qv), the second from a relative on his mother's side, and was to use it throughout his subsequent career as novelist and playwright. He began acting at the Abbey Theatre in late 1910 in a succession of minor roles and was part of the troupe that went on the second tour of the USA in early 1912. He returned before the rest of the company and contributed an article entitled ‘The Abbey Theatre: is it on the decline?’ to the Irish Independent of 9 May 1913, in which he lambasted the degeneration of this once great institution ‘to the level of a touring company’, and noted the failure to develop important new dramatists in the wake of the early death of J. M. Synge (qv). He went back to live at Delvin and began to write, not only poems and prose but also cultural and political journalism for a wide range of publications. In the summer of 1916 he wrote his first novel. The valley of the squinting windows is the work by which McNamara is chiefly remembered, its title a byword for small-town hypocrisy and begrudgery. The work itself is an uneasy fusion of a satiric portrait of gossipy, prying women and dipsomaniacally drinking men with a naturalist tragedy in which the sins of the past repeat themselves in the lives of the younger characters. The novel's frank treatment of sexual matters was eclipsed as a cause of offence by the unflattering portrayal of almost all the inhabitants of the town, a place that local people felt would be automatically identified as Delvin. In the ensuing controversy the novelist's father, James Weldon (widely suspected of being the author), and his school were subject to boycott. His attempts to seek legal redress in 1923 were unsuccessful.
The years between 1916 and 1923 were McNamara's most prolific as a prose writer. Three novels rapidly followed his controversial debut, showing an increase in technical sophistication as they variously represented how political idealism foundered and soured in an uncongenial social environment. In 1919 he returned to the Abbey Theatre, now as a playwright, with ‘The land for the people’, in which he took his last acting role, that of father to the young author modelled on himself. McNamara was to contribute many plays over the years to the Abbey repertory. Initially, these were Ibsenite studies similar to his prose writings. But a change of personal circumstances may have dictated a change of dramatic approach. In 1920 he married Helena (Lena) Degidon at Quin, Co. Clare; a son, Oliver, was born 16 May 1921. While his wife remained at Quin with their son, McNamara had by this time moved to Dublin, and wished to remain there for most of each year. In November 1923 his play ‘The glorious uncertainty’ proved a popular success at the Abbey and it remained in the repertory for more than ten years; in it McNamara mined a (for him) new and unexpected vein of romantic comedy as an entire midlands community succumbs to horseracing mania. In 1926 he followed it with the even more successful ‘Look at the Heffernans!’, in which an enterprising seamstress (his mother's profession) manages to coax a family of confirmed bachelors into a series of late marriages. The two plays show the persistence of gossip and intrigue as themes in his work, but they are now handled with a lighter touch and directed to comic rather than tragic ends. They also argue a growing political conservatism.
In 1925 McNamara was appointed registrar to the NGI in Dublin, a position he held until his retirement in 1960. In 1932 he became one of the first members of the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1935 joined the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre. The board then approved a production of the experimentalist world war one play ‘The silver tassie’ by Sean O'Casey (qv), rejected seven years earlier. The production unleashed a storm of disapproval, mainly on the score of alleged blasphemy. McNamara broke ranks and silence to say to the newspapers that, as the only catholic director, he had consented reluctantly to the board's decision and that he had never approved O'Casey's ‘vulgar and worthless plays’ (an accusation that left him open to the charge of professional jealousy). The controversy created by his comments left him no choice but to resign. Where earlier (unlike O'Casey) he had written plays as either comedies or tragedies, up to the harrowing ‘Margaret Gillan’ (1932), he attempted to blend the two in ‘The grand house in the city’ (1936), with mixed results. Only two more plays of his were staged, the second of which – ‘Marks and Mabel’ (1945) – was written as a sequel to ‘Look at the Heffernans!’ From 1940 to 1945 McNamara was theatre critic of the Irish Times. His final prose publication, an experimental novella, The whole story of the X.Y.Z., appeared in 1951. His later years were dogged by increasing ill health and he died 4 February 1963 (intestate) at Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital, Dublin.