On Stage

...He has since learned- partly through living, partly through a postwar visit to Buchenwald-that "We've gotta get deeper than hate...

...Hate's no help...

...But how good is the Abbey Theater really...

...David Margulies is too crude and too American, and Jeffrey DeMunn fails to find the center of his character...

...I think it is the least verbose and maudlin of O'Casey's major plays, and not blighted, like Juno, by an artificially measured-out dosage of comedy and tragedy...

...For this is what Griffiths is after, with his study of an adult-education evening course in stand-up comedy given in a Man?chester high school by an elderly ex-comic who barely missed the big time...

...This is partly the result of certain cuts and changes in the text, presumably intended to make the proceedings more explicit and less disturbing...

...He is a frequently agitated chrysalis emitting globs of fiery sarcasm, while the butterfly remains foreover deferred...

...Since we are on the subject of unanswered questions, let us ask ourselves again where Dore Schary, after an imposing string of failures, gets the money to put on still another of his drippingly well-meaning but uninventively talky, shapeless, untheatrical, and platitudinous concoctions This time out, Sohary has produced Herzl, his adaptation with Amos Elon of the latter's biography of the father of Zionism, and he has managed to make not only Herzl, but also such other distinguished dramatis personae as Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, supremely boring...

...Of the rest, unfortunately, Jar-lath Conroy and John Lithgow make the sole significant contributions (although Norman Allen as a cranky caretaker and Robert Gerringer as a bored announcer do nice?ly by their bits...

...The play now leans toward slickness rather than toward terror...

...O'Casey was really on to something -that in Ireland, even to this day, wars of liberation and civil wars could be reduced to a kind of bloody farce...

...Nichols has directed with his usual efficiency and polish, though slighting to some extent the deeper meanings...

...but it would have required a great?er talent with words and dramaturgy than his to do justice to this harsh absurdist insight...

...In the middle stands Eddie Waters, the instructor, a man who was once rath?er like Price...

...Yet if there is anything that can further undermine our already sorely beleaguered theater it is goody-goody amateurishness...

...Still, The Plough and the Stars does have its share of raw truth: a view of the 1916 Easter Uprising that makes it out neither saintly nor particularly heroic, only very hu?man...

...Not unlike O'Casey in spirit and approach is Trevor Griffiths, whose London success, Comedians, has come to Broadway staged by Mike Nichols...

...At the other extreme is Challenor, the obtuse and cynical talent scout, whose notion of comedy is purely digestive: dirty jokes-sexual, scato?logical, ethnic-but tasteful...

...Siobhan Mac-.Kenna is both strong and droll as Bessie Burgess, even if she does let her death scene become a mite operatic...

...Almost our best play," Yeats called it in a letter to Ethel Mannin...

...worst of all, Milo O'Shea is inexpressive and dull in the key role of Waters...

...The sometimes deliberately superficial humor of the outer layer and the high-flown ideological implications need more of the cement of humanity to hold them together...

...The Abbey did have some splendid actors, and in Synge at least one potentially great play?wright, though I don't think he lived long enough to fulfill his promise...

...It is allowed to move freely wherever the winds of emotion blow it, but there too lies a trap: The main characters, Jack and Nora Clitheroe, end up being sketchy, disappearing nearly as much as they appear...

...The most crudely conventional jokesters are hired for London appearances, Price is summarily rebuked by ChalIenor and there is a final agon between Waters and Price...

...Moreover, the casting is far from ideal...

...but there is also Gethin Price, a seething radi?cal-Socialist misfit, eccentric to the point of craziness or brilliance, or both, and aiming to use his humor as a revolutionary weapon...

...Only Gethin Price is played to perfection by Jonathan Pryce, who created the part in Nottingham and London: a homely, gangly hob?goblin of a man, of whose bodily and mental moves-now eerily relaxed, now ultrafast and disorienting -we can never be quite sure what to make...

...worse yet-down?right amateurish-is Bill Foley's Peter Flynn...

...Yet there was never a great director at the Abbey, one of international stature, and so never theater at its best...

...The play itself is, like O'Casey's works in general, less than unassailable...

...Griffiths can write, but he does not let us very long or deeply into the confidence of his characters, so that we lack the middle term between the comic-cruel surface and the philosophical core...

...Five of them are more or less typical, more or less funny or dedicated pranksters...

...And how good is O'Casey...

...Miss Horniman, the patroness of the venture, was a total amateur...

...Be that as it may, MacAnna's Plough and the Stars rivals those mummified mountings of Chekhov that the Mos?cow Art Theater preserves, as it were, in glass .sarcophaguses, with the dust of ages upon them and the stink of decomposition inside...

...Tomas MacAnna, the director, made a good showing here some years ago with Borstal Boy, but I have since learned that most of the credit for that production should have gone to his assist?ant, Vincent Dowling, then an ac?tor-director with the Abbey...

...and a vision of men at war as pathetic toy soldiers who do not recognize that they are toy soldiers, or that toy soldiers also die...

...MacAnna's staging is matched in conventionality by Bronwen Casson's sets and costumes...

...Cyril Cusack is fine as Fluther Good, though too much movie acting may have over-relaxed his elocution...

...Schary, who himself began in the film business, is the theatrical equivalent of the movies' Stanley Kramer: all Noble and Important Subjects and minimal imagination and know-how...

...When will the American theater and cin?ema recognize this Irish actor for the third-rater he is and stop casting him in a variety of British roles, many of which he is even accentually unsuited for...

...The current offering is one of those museum productions of a play the Abbey can run through with its eyes shut and its hands tied behind its back-not, alas, with open eyes and free hands...

...As the war-crossed Clitheroes, however, Clive Geraghty and Sorcha Cusack are totally unmoving- Miss Cusack, indeed, acts like someone who got the part because she is the star's daughter...

...Neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory, the Ab?bey's twin mentors, could claim true professional status...

...An unusually fancy audience of the kind that tends to think of Brooklyn as somewhere in the vicinity of Timbuktoo (when the Van Goghs were at the Brooklyn Museum, a friend of mine remarked that he found it easier to catch them in Holland) showed up in large numbers to see this world-famous aggregation in one of their showpieces...

...The second act is the tryout...

...The acting, on the whole, ranges from undistinguished to bad, with three exceptions...

...And it had O'Casey, such as he was...

...The six students put on their respective acts (some complete with mishaps) according to their bents and abilities, culminating in Price's cruel routine with a couple of dummies in upper-class attire that ends in mock blood...

...And Maire O'Neill has hearty fun with the part of a boozy whore...

...and the minor characters are apt to vanish almost immediately, or be suddenly and unpersuasively dragged out of farce into tragedy...

...in the large Palace Theater, this pitiful little nonplay rattled around issuing hollow noises and the stench of piety...

...George Russell (AE), writing to Ernest Boyd, declared it not "at all as good as Juno and the Paycock," and added that, for all its power, he did not wish to see it again...

...Then both companies went into a decline...

...The au?thor's sympathy seems to be evenly divided between Waters' humanistic stoicism and Price's revolutionary intransigence, with perhaps a slight nod to the latter...

...Thus the "silhouetted figure" of the orator in Act II is made fully visible by the direction and set design-a typical literalizing of what the author wanted to be suggestive and expressionistic...

...Out of the juicy role of the spineless Marxist Covey, John Kavanagh squeezes remark?ably little life...

...it was merely the single theater of consequence in Ireland until the Gate came along and quickly wrested leadership from it...

...Six pupils are revealed in the first act as they undergo final briefing and practice for their debuts in a nearby working-class club that will have a London talent scout in the audience...

...Altogether, the indomitable Irishry seemed to me rather domitable...

...As things are, the transitions from farce to pathos, say, feel too sudden, dragged-in and un?earned...

...it should have been balanced on the uneasy edge between the two...

...The truth of the matter seems to be that the Abbey was never one of the world's great theaters...

...THE PLAY, using a school for comics as a political-existential allegory, is somewhat reminiscent of Osborne's The Entertainer, and once again I wondered whether the music hall, the night club, stand-up comedy constitute an adequate metaphor for such weighty matters...

...Act III is, then, a post-mortem of sorts...

...That useful term, dark comedy, is badly in need of a sister designation such as laughing (or sniggering) tragedy...