Two Irish Plays

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

Two Irish Plays

THE power of the Irish idiom to give sharpness, beauty and humour to a situation, however drab and sordid it may be. is well illustrated in Louis L. D'Alton's "Two Irish Plays" (Macmillans). The first of these plnvs, "The Mm in tha Cloak," centres on James Clarence Mangan, the Irish poet of a ccnttiry ngo, who is best known for his "Dark Rosiileen." Mnngnn is shown here in his decline and death, a broken man full of unrealised dreams and self-pjtr. His failure of a father, full of hateful boast, ing and conceit, taunts and bullies him; the woman he loves is stricken with mortal disease; and poverty and drink and drugs bring him to a Dublin hovel and it« low life. ♦ *

The play at the end shows the shadow of the great famine, and the cholera that is clutching Dublin. The weakness in this play without plot, which follows closely the facts of Mangans life, is that Mangan himself is too weak and too far gone in his decay to be a protagonist. One feels that he is just a leaf borne before the wind. The main worth of the play lies in the sharplyetched characters with whom Mangan mixes, such as Mick Fogarty, with his "disarming cockiness," and Marty, who gets drunk on words, and in the barbed <>r beautiful speech, which grows like roses out, of refuse, the thorns as big » s tno bloom*. vi. Y ';?.'"l' no,hin ' can touch • • • n bw>k out o* vour rnt""i,t»,nt. °v" ,r m,,n n "' iu>i« I i lis nut o books to show where everv--1111- else N wrong. Ye S et alone we'll Mi much no, HUlin' | n an" out between the nun drops the wnv you wouldn't be we'u outoo n , ,h * w " rm corners wen out o the war where no one wonlil worm th<>ir h< " el on llk ® the There is the same tang of speech, so novel and exciting to English ears, in the second play. "The Mousetrap." Listen to young Molly Whalen describing an encounter with the police. K . An ' J talked up to the door a big chuckle-headed Civvy Guard, that never was a half perch from the middle o the forlorn bog where he was born, stops me. Where's your birth certificate? -i.k * Co , D)ln ' "P ,n a covered ran ww , aQ illuminated address, says I. Where s your own? ... I'm satisfied bv your size you're under age, says he. Is that right? I said. I'm satisfied. I said, that if your brain* were in f>oportion to your size. Napoleon would be only trot tin' after ye. But ns It Is, I mid. you'd need twice ns mil eh wit In be classified as a half eejut. I was weir able for him. This piny, about imaginary people, is a better play than the one about the real Mangan. It is an old theme handled with deep understanding. The daughter loves too well a man she does not know to be married, and the disgrace, felt with particular keenness in an Irish Catholic household, causes two deaths besides the girl's and sends her brother to the dock. It is the apparently lightminded Molly who speaks movingly the counsel of forgivenness that the family needs so much, and who, at the very end of the play, takes in her arms lovingly the tiny infant that has destroyed so much. A dark play, lit up by beauty and compassion.