Mangan, Macbeth, Invincibles, Etc

Irish Jesuit Province

Mangan, Macbeth, Invincibles, Etc.Review by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 65, No. 774 (Dec., 1937), pp. 838-846Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514237 .

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888

Sitting at the Play

Mangan, Macbeth, Invincibles, Etc.

BY GABRIEL FALLON.

ANGAN, Macbeth And the Invincibles! The theatre tucks in strange bedfellows.

Mr. Louis D'Alton, author of that familiarly realistic

though strangely unreal novel, Death is So Fair, evidently deter mined to turn playwright. So he considered Mangan, less wisely

perhaps than well, and sent the result of his considerations to the

Abbey Theatre. The script was accepted. And The Man in the

Cloak, described as a play in three acts, was produced on 27th

September and retained for a fortnight. Mr. D'Alton (but this is not a matter for a drama critic) took Mangan at his word. That is to say, he took Mangan's opinion of Mangan. Wha;t is more,

he largely took Mangan's opinion of other people, in particular Mangan's opinion of his father. In this, of course, Mr. D'Alton may or may not have been justified; the biographers can say. It hardly matters to the drama critic, or to the dramatist, that

Mangan's opinion of other people was, to say the least of it,

untrustworthy, if from the material provided by this opinion the playwright succeeds in bringing forth a play. However, the quarrel on this occasion must rest solely upon the point that the play was not brought forth.

Act I of The Man in the Cloak showed us an attic in a doss house in Bride Street, Mangan for the first time, and Mr.

D'Alton at work. And very pleased we were, too, at Mr.



MANGAN, MACBETH, INVINCIBLES, ETC. 889

D'Alton's promise as a working dramatist. Good characterisa

tion, smooth technique, and Mangan's fine dramatic entrance "I am Mangan the Poet ! "-made us hope for the best. But didl

Mr. D'Alton grow tired-or fearful of his task?

For Act II revealed the measure of a dramatist's defeat. The programme simply referred to it as " M'angan's Dream." It's

really an old dodge, this dream business, though it attempts to parade under the modern title of "cinema flash-back " tech

nique. The very word " cinema should exile it from the theatre. You may write a very fine play about a dream, I grant.

you; you may even call it The Dream Play, as Strindberg did.

But you cannot take to dreaming right in the middle of your play

writing.

The dream-scene is simply a God-send, as we say, to the indif

ferent dramatist. Awake and play-writing, he must face the

Unities, or at least he must attempt to face them. Asleep and

dreaming, he can tell them to go about their business. He can

go backward or forward in time just as he pleases. He can go

up or down the world, in or out of it, at his own sweet will.

Puck's record for putting a girdle round the earth is not safe

while the dreaming dramatist is about. He can juggle with reality as no juggler ever juggled with hoops or plates or tin

trays. He can crowd his stage with hobgoblins, should he find a producer willing and able to help him. He may even make the

quick to converse with the dead, and the dead to hold converse

with the quick. In this blessed state there is no limit to his ability.

Naturally, then, this dream act is always a lengthy one. In

The Man in the Cloak it traversed the greater part of poor Mangan's thirty-nine years. It traversed them despairfully, woefully. There were plenty of dim " spots," of course, and



8/to TIIE IRISH MONTHLY

innumerable " black-outs. " The Spirit of Drink appeared to us (very tastefully clad in white draperies and a Nice carival

mask). And that dreadful father whose dreadfulness may have

been so much of Mangan's making. And lots of quarrelling and screaming on Mangan's part. And Catherine Hayes and a

little wistful love-making. And then the ghost of Mangan's father, and the ghost of Catherine Hayes, and divers other spirits, all of them dutifully speaking in deep sepulchral voices. And the

ghost of Catherine Hayes intoning: ; "I am dead." And a

spirit from the shades replying (though, of course, in a lower octave): " She is dead."' And poor Mangan screaming: " Here and in Hell." And continuing to scream " Here and in Hell " until the stage electrician " blacked out "and the cur

tain descended, and the house lights went on again and the ten

mninuto interval began. Actually, there was much more in it

than that, but that was much of it, and much of the more was

that.

And then, when we had dutifully waited our ten minutes (not that we hadn't the excellent Abbey orchestra to conitort us),

we were brought back again to reality and wakefulness, and the

doss-house in Bride Street. And there was Mangan himself,

just where we left him, waking to the charge of being a cholera

suspect, an exit to the hospital and the final curtain. And when

we left the theatre our final disappointment was deepened by the

feeling that Mr. Louis D'Alton has the stuff of play-writing in

him, and might, had he the courage to have faced the task, have

made a memorable play by working more on the little that was

fine and noble than on the strange, sad, shadow-side of James

Clarence Mangan. Well-deserved tributes have been paid to

that excellent actor, Mr. Cyril Cusack, for his characterisation of

the part of Mangan. Let me add to them by saluting something




which the other critics failed to take into account-his fine power of physical endurance.

$ *e *

Macbeth's head upon a pole, a ghosted Banquo that popped on and off again in the most approved Maskelyne manner, and all the wonders of a walking wood-these, ladies and gentlemen,. were the exciting rarities which graced the production of Mr., Shakespeare's play at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in the mad,, merry month of October.

To console us for all that we bad Mr. Edwards's Macbeth and

Miss Carmichael's Lady Macbeth, two fine workmanlike per formances. And we had the words of Mr. Shakespeare, of course.

With such evidence before us, we cannot agree 'with the Dublin drama critic who declared that " Macbeth is no more than a series of bloody incidents."

Nevertheless, we must protest that there was an atmosphere surrounding this production of Macbeth which might possibly induce a very strange frame of mind in a critic. Macbeth's head, for instance? Yes, there's some warrant for it. Enter Macduff >with Macbeth's head. " Behold where stands the usurper's cursed head." The pole? Mark " stands." And recall

Macduff: " We'll have, thee as our rarer monsters are, painted upon a pole. " But surely the text suggests (whatever the mean

ing of " painted ") that this particular " pole " fate only awaits

Macbeth living. " Then yield thee, coward, and live to be the

show and gaze o' the time. " However, be that as it may, an

uphoisted head has never yet crazed a critic. But the popping Banquo and the walking wood. We giggled-of course we

giggled-giggled as much as if Banquo had squeaked: " Slap,

bang, here we are again ;" giggled as much as if those boughs of Birnam had burst forth into the concluding lines of Joyce Kilmer's poem.



842 THE IRISH MONTHLY

Now, there is something in all this which suggests that the approach to the production was not made in the proper spirit. There is more than a little evidence to show the straining of the text to produce that head-upon-the-pole effect. And it was quite clear that considerable trouble had been entailed in the ghosting of Banquo and the marshalling of Birnam. But what do these things really matter in the play? Nothing. They may even prove a hindrance to it. After all, the popping Banquo and the walking wood caused us to giggle. (And supposing the head fell off the pole-?) Surely, it is much more important that Macbeth should comport himself like a man who has seen a ghost than that the audience should see the very full-blooded ghost of

Banquo. A man gazing intensely at the empty air presents a much more dramatic spectacle than the coming on again of a character whom the audience have seen brutally murdered in the preceding act.

" We have had, and have," said Mr. Granville Barker in his broadcast talk on October 13th, "producers who, instead of using the modern theatre to restore Shakespeare's art to us, have used him-and most shamefully misused him-as a stalking horse for their own extravagances." While we feel that Mr. Granville

Barker's words do not wholly apply here, nevertheless this

approach to Macbeth falls beneath the shadow of their castiga tion. We expected better of the Gate Theatre. Perhaps we

were wrong in thinking that in this place at least we would find

artists with wisdom enough to see that the best of all approaches to the work of the great dramatist is the very humble one of

using all gently and of leaving the rest in the hands of the drama

tist himself.

The first production of The Invincibles, a play in seven scenes, by Hugh Hunt and Frank O'Connor, opened at the Abbey




Theatre on Monday, 18th October, with the lowering of the house lights, the playing of Chopin's Funeral March, and a note on the Abbey programme. The note (in no uncertain terms)

made it quite clear to us that it was the intention of the authors to wipe away the " English defamation of Brady and his friends, and the " Irish calumnies" of " national and Catholic historians." To a great measure, the authors succeeded in their task. That they used some rather obvious means to attain that end hardly matters, perhaps. What does matter, though, is the fact that they used the theatri badly, when at all.

Standing high abovc this strange mixture of drivelling dia logue, trivial theatrical tricks and inept production are the three figures of James Carey, Joe Brady and Tim Kelly. One would imagine that these characters had been created in some separate

workshop and then dropped bodily into the rest of the play. It is hard to believe that the creator of these outstanding figures failed to make even one minor character (out of the twenty odd ones that were in it) live. With all due respect to the splendid interpretations given by Messrs. Johnson, O'Gorman and

Cusack, the characters were so well drawn that they provided full scope for splendid interpretations. Carey, Brady and Kelly really lived again, this time to their author's opinion of them,

which was neither to the whim of calumny nor defamation. For the rest we had strange oaths and cuss-words, both loud and

deep, flying from the bearded lips of brawling stage-Irish Fenians like hail before wind. So freely did one word fly, and so fre quently did its flying flick laughter from the audience, that a grim tragic reference to the bloody knives was lost in a smother of mirth. In this, of course, the authors, and not the laughers, were to blame. There is a use of expletives, and there is an abuse of them. And Messrs. Hunt and O'Connor abused them soundly, sentence by sentence, and line by line.




That there were Fenians other than the Denzille and Peter, Street specimens which Messrs. Hunt and O'Connor thought fit to serve out to us, I, for one, am prepared to believe. Perhaps this did not occur to them in the anxlxiety of their special pleading.

And if beside the Hunt and O'Connor Fenians, the Hunt and O'Connor Invincibles were men, it was mainly because the Hunt and O'Connor Fenians were not men at all, but shadows pur

suing pint pots; guys of straw propped up with ignorance, bitter ness, wrangling, cowardice, reerimination and bowler hats. Once again the possibility that the authors divided their work (" You do the Fenians and I'll do the Invincibles ") presents itself.

The production of this play simply reeked with theatrical bluff. There was hardly any call for a two-level stage. It was obvious

that the play was made to fit the demands of the stage, and not

the stage the play. Consequently, the audience (pit and stalls)

were forced to take " a camera angle " of some of the finest acting Fred Johnson has done. The actor himself had to strive desperately to overcome this handicap. (How the occupants of some of the balcony seats managed to see him perched up in the extreme right-hand corner of the stage, I know not.) Carry ing the play into the auditorium, despite the fourth wall conven

tion, is an old game now. It was excellently played-and over

played-in the American play, Spread-Eagle. As carried out

in The Invincibles, it merely served to distract the attention of the audience from the play. The singing of the hymn by the actors specially sent round to the pit and balcony, was not only (as somieone suggested) bad taste-it was very definitely bad theatre.

That said, a tribute must be paid to the casting of Fred

Johnson, W. O'Gorman and Cyril Cusack in the parts of James

Carey, Joe Brady and Tim Kelly. By their splendid acting of these parts they helped the authors to give to the audience the



MANGAN, MACBETH, INVIATCIBLES, ETC. 845

only things that mattered in this production. Even then they were occasionally tripped-up in their task, and the failure of the audience to appreciate the hysteria of Tim Kelly (one of the finest pieces of acting I have seen) was due in a large measure to the fact that Messrs. Hunt and O'Connor have a lot to leam yet as playwrights.

* *? *

The standing of Miss Teresa Deevy as a dramatist has always been a puzzle to me. Her Katie Roche was hailed here by its acceptors and the critics as the work of a great playwright. There was a great murmuring of the name of Tchehov, of course, which in itself is always a bad sign. Tchehov was a great drama tist simply because he was Tchehov. And only to the extent that Miss Deevy (or anyone else for that matter) could be true to oneself and not to Tchehov could Miss Deevy (br anyone else for that matter) be a great dramatist at all.

Now from the Ambassador Theatre, New York, comes the news that Katie Roche was by no means enthusiastically received by the American critics. Under the caption, " Irish Troupers Return with Flimsy Play," Mr. John Anderson wrote: " The Irish Players are back again, the players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and our Ambassador playhouse was filled on Saturday night with the flow of soft voices and rich accents, with the buoyance and delicate humour of their acting, and it was filled

too9 I regret to add, with a play called Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy. To say that the play was the fly in the ointment is to

minilmise its aimless and talkative medium. You can scarcely see the ointment for the fly. What Katie did seemed to be the chief interest in Miss Deevy's portrait, and Katie's doings were so vague and irresolute that I found difficulty in following their

significance. Miss Deevy's craftsmanship is woefully amateurish,




and her characters stroll in and out with such unexplained fre quency that I, for one, thought the hinges on the front door

wouldn't last out the performance. Nor is the dialogue any surer in its movement. There is endless talk about the weather, about tea, and about borrowing a bench which the skiffers bor row every year for the regatta dance. It all seemed just so much talk, and the only redeeming feature of it is that even just talk has a way of sounding friendly on the tongues of the Irish players." Mr. Anderson may be wrong, very wrong, in his estimation of Miss Deevy's work. So far he has against him the Abbey Theatre directors, many audiences, a London pub lisher, and all-but one-of the Dublin drama crities.



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Mangan, Macbeth, Invincibles, Etc