Theatre: Abbey’s Return

The least dressy of the world’s four great theatre organizations* arrived in Manhattan last week for a month’s stay before touring the U.S. Far less numerous than New York’s Jews but no less demonstrative, the city’s Irish gave the Abbey Theatre players from Dublin a warm Hibernian welcome. Drama lovers in general were glad to have the troupe back after a two-year absence, but the first offering, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough & the Stars, was strictly for Irish ears. Its brogue was so thick that the play remained practically unintelligible to non-wearers of the green.

Chief critical interest in The Plough & the Stars was its comparison with Mr. O’Casey’s fantastic Within the Gates, also playing in Manhattan (TIME, Nov. 5). Consensus of cooler heads was that O’Casey’s earlier realism had cards and spades over his later flights into the realm of theatrical fancy.

Scene is a poor district of north Dublin during the 1916 Easter Week Rebellion. Mr. O’Casey has no illusions about that shabby affray. His Commandant Jack Clitheroe of the Irish Citizen Army is a crack-brained patriot who is willing to die for his country but not to live for it. An idealistic Socialist called “The Covey” does not have the courage to go out into the streets for the doctrines he preaches when the guns begin to roll. The whole cast of tenement dwellers are represented as drunken, excitable dunderheads who have small belief in, and no comprehension of, the patriotic rant they scream at one another. It is small wonder that Mr. O’Casey’s unflattering portrait of Dublin Irishmen in the nation’s darkest hour caused a riot when it was first produced in 1926.

The Plough & the Stars is the power play in the Abbey’s repertoire. On the light side, Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish, seen in Manhattan last year as Is Life Worth Living?, tells the story of a troupe of serious actors who completely demoralize a seaside resort, accustomed to nothing but low comedy, with stark selections from Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, Turgenev. After a fortnight, murder and melancholy break out all over the impressionable community. After seeing The Father, the local butcher throws a meat ax at his wife. After seeing An Enemy of the People, the local politico votes against the Government and precipitates a national election. The proprietor of the play pavilion saves the situation by firing the lugubrious Thespians and hiring a circus.

Robinson’s The Far-off Hills, George Shiel’s The New Gossoon, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, will be among the Abbey offerings to be seen this winter in Washington, Cincinnati, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston.

* The other three: Theatre Guild, Comédie Francaise, Moscow Art Theatre.