O'Casey and the Rising
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage O'CASEY AND THE RISING BY ALBERT BERMEL Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (at the Vivian Beaumont through February 10) has an extraordinary final scene. Two English soldiers sit in...
...it causes Nora to have a stillborn child and lose her sanity...
...in the teeth of her neighbors, Pauline Flanagan refuses to pander to the audience's sympathies, even when, at the end, Bessie risks (and loses) her life for Nora, whom she had earlier attacked...
...They play games of hating, having nothing better to do...
...For a dramatist to denude his stage of its principal actors at such a moment takes Euripidean pluck...
...The effect is of a camera quickly tracking away from a painting, putting tremendous distance between the work and the observer and leaving it inaccessible, frozen in space, yet with its colors and definition harder than ever...
...A week of rebellion has left the country depleted and Britain feeling like anything but a victor...
...The two men on stage join in the refrain, teacups in hand...
...Yet few editors (or critics) appear comfortable with the plays...
...There is nothing to do except to retreat into vulgar, plangent nostalgia...
...In 1916 Britain was fighting on two fronts, Europe and Ireland, but its government had sent many Irish youths to help man the Belgian trenches...
...Like Yeats he is praised, if at all, for his verbal dexterity and, again like Yeats, he conceals beneath a rubble of words conflicts, tableaux and dramatic symbols that are durable poetry of the theatre...
...With his head tilted forward and his knees buckling a little, he is a walking (or loafing) letter S. But an S that really straightens up under provocation...
...Like Chekhov's characters, they are bored...
...the unrelated cousin and uncle treat one another with a contempt that has no personal foundation and therefore must masquerade as an ideological rift: The uncle, a laborer, likes to dress up in patriotic uniform...
...So offended were the first spectators at the Abbey Theater in 1926 that they stopped the production cold...
...Marchand makes us understand that O'Casey's drama is precisely about people like her, grabbing what they can when they canA bit of warmth, a drink, shoes from a looted storebecause they lack so much else...
...Outside they hear the arguments of Irish rifles with British machine guns and heavy artillery...
...It claims the lives of Jack, Bessie and Jinnie's daughter...
...the room, ravaged by the Easter Rising of 1916 and policed by troops, is the city drawn small...
...The author and producer (Yeats) underwent vilification in the press for months on end...
...The neighbors downstairs, Nora and Jack Clitheroe, share their two-room fiat with his cousin and her uncle...
...The crackling and slamming of ammunition give way to the sound of the English singing in the street below...
...O'Casey has become a reluctant habit...
...Life has been drained of purpose...
...Nancy Marchand, at other times a genuinely ladylike actress, plays Jinnie Gogan with reddened nose and hands, blacked-out teeth, frizzled hair, and an apron dress that responds with surprising fluency to her cylindrically padded body...
...Presiding over them all like a household god, Fluther Good the carpenter, one of O'Casey's memorable creations, sometimes shuts off the squabbles, sometimes referees them, and sometimes takes over one side or the otherit doesn't matter which...
...The leaders, dead or alive, win glory or infamy...
...Somebody breaks them up in time...
...It takes a fiercely loyal staging to prove these obstacles trifling beside the pleasure O'Casey's grand theatrical imagery affords...
...Flanagan interprets Bessie with regal loftiness, and in her death scene gives the kind of performance witnessed all too rarely in our starveling theater...
...The poor are lucky if their bodies win a decent burial...
...They sing reflectively at first, then passionately...
...They taunt each other, roll up their sleeves, circle the stage like animals ready to claw up an opponent...
...As Fluther, a part created by Barry Fitzgerald, Jack MacGowran has so naturally attuned the movements of his voice and body to the play's modulations and to the presences of the other actors that one hardly realizes he is giving a bravura display of technique...
...She is killed by an un-Dar-winian fluke while weaker people survive...
...While the fighting is at its height, we see the face of the dying consumptive girl curiously lit up and white, an angel-in-the-window touch that may be spurious but adds to the poignancy, as though Cathleen ni Houlihan, Ireland herself, were giving up the ghost...
...Most of O'Casey's dramas have had peculiar careers...
...and the repetition of tag phrases and words, the discount goods of playwriting...
...Or by the inclusion of a streetwalker...
...On these Dubliners the Rising and its aftermath impose a truce and terrible forfeits...
...anything for a brawl...
...their names live after them...
...Amid the bursts stray voices plead for an ambulance and the Red Cross...
...The British mainland was not occupied during World War I. Ireland was, and is...
...The four settings (mounted on a turntable) that Douglas W. Schmidt has devised are unified by a drab background of slum windows in perspective...
...Taken nearly to the limits of her passion Nora would be a soap soprano...
...The poor, when out of work or short of work, have time to kill...
...Dublin, not merely the characters, is under siege, and so, after a bombardment, mortar dust sifts out from between the bricks of the building...
...After the revolution, what...
...In speaking, he handles O'Casey's longer cadences with a loving, musical deftness, taking each one to a fresh, gasping crescendo...
...Jinnie, abandoned years before by her consumptive man, has only his legacy, a daughter dying of consumption...
...Beginning as an ingenue wife, she is transformed into a tragic figure, modeled possibly on Ophelia, who loves her husband so consumingly that she can only drive him from her...
...Bessie's son is in the British Army and she cannot bear to think of a British defeat, even in Ireland...
...As Bessie Burgess, a formidable puritan who sings "Rule, Britannia...
...O'Casey's choice of song, "Keep the Home Fires Burning," and of British singers for it, is masterly...
...unlike Chekhov's, they are poor...
...Sullivan's big contribution, however, lies in the imaginative, unstinted acting he has elicited from his east...
...Anthologists dutifully reprint them and pay tribute to the author's gift of gab...
...At that moment we recall the child she wanted so badly...
...The characters make war only with their mouths and gestures...
...The earlier acts have shown us its tenants, men and women alike, continually bickering...
...They reprint them, I surmise, not out of affection, but because everybody else does...
...A woman killed by the tommies lies on the floor in front of them, a bedsheet over her corpse...
...Nora, too, is a personality of heroic caliber...
...the cousin is an out-and-out Marxist who has no use for nationalistic sentiments...
...the rest of the bustling cast, the Irish people we know, have disappeared...
...they carp at the free-form structures and disapprove of O'Casey's blending racy humor with sadness...
...directions to the cast that, much like O'Neill's, distend the characters' feelings and elbow the reader ("screaming . . . struggling...
...But the fights never happen...
...A Protestant among Catholics, a former secretary of the Citizen Army who resigned in protest against its aristocratic tendencies, O'Casey looked forward to Ireland's independence and, at the same time, could not help fearing the cost in bloodshed and suffering...
...There certainly are at least three obstacles separating his texts from the reader: the alliteration, nearly always strained and, during the less cheerful episodes, ludicrous ("madly minglin' memories of th' past...
...But Roberta Maxwell goes all the way to the limits, unashamedly, lifting the drama to the altitude it needs before it can plummet to its final scene of hopeless inertia...
...All of these, I would guessbut more, the coolness of the author's viewpoint, as evidenced throughout the play and summed up by the distancing effect of his last tableau...
...They console themselves with quarrels, an impoverished form of self-assertion, a way of staying alive...
...We met the soldiers only a few minutes before...
...vehemently...
...Two English soldiers sit in an attic in Dublin...
...MacGowran is a guest star, but the Lincoln Center company offers several performances that match his for virtuosity...
...Bessie Burgess, who sells fruit off a street cart, and Jinnie Gogan, an unemployed charwoman, spit out murderous threats, yet each knows the other's tribulations...
...Dan Sullivan's directing at the Beaumont digs for these richer qualities...
...Or the careless blasphemies...
...Was the bitterness caused, as historians suggest, by O'Casey's unfavorable portraits of the Irish, as had happened before with Synge's plays...
...Bessie is the uncrowned queen of the tenement, the strongest-willed character in the cast...
...For them the home fires were burning all right: The play's text mentions "the glare in the sky seen through the window," which "flares into a fuller and deeper red...
...Warming her bottom by a fire or expatiating on sickness, funerals and other people's misfortunes (while her own daughter's life is waning), Jinnie, like Fluther, seems a peripheral character, until Ms...
...The tenement the soldiers are sitting in always was an informal battlefield...
...In this dilemma he joins the ranks of playwrights of many ages from Shakespeare (Julius Caesar), Buchner (Damon's Death), and Romain Rolland (the Theatre de la Revolution cycle) to Richard Wesley (The Black Terror...
...It was stillborn, O'Casey has told us, like the Easter Rising...
...Here at last is the game of fighting for real...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 3
