SOWING THE WIND

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 113, 15 May 1930, Page 4

SOWING THE WIND

AND REAPING WHIRLWINDS

, SATIRE ON GUNMANSHIP

Scan O'Ca,sey's "The Shadow of a Gunman," read'by.Prbfessor J. Shelley at the W.E.A. lecture room last evening, leaves the audience longing for more of O'Casey's work; but, probably because the acoustic quality of the hall is riot perfect, anyone who goes to hear a reading should have read and understood the matter beforehand. Heard thus, O'Casey is delightful.

The artistic sincerity required in order to write in ; Ireland this merciless satire on Irish gunm^nship is obvious on the face of the'play. Donal Davoren is a dualnatured man with the Celtic gift for poetry, and'lacking .the' Celtic gift for action (though it is teeming all round him in turbulent, Black and Tan, post-war Ireland). This struggling poet, coming mysteriously into a poor-class Dublin tenement, is suspected by the various lodgers (Irish types) of being a gunman in hiding (or "on the run"). He is not a gunman, but his vanity allows the halo to hang on him; especially as Minnie •Powell- (in her early twenties) has a romantic fancy for the gun gentry. His unpoetic but evidently educated fellow-lodger, Seumas Shields, follows the trade of a pedlar, helped occasionally ;by one Maguire. Maguird is a real gunman in his spare time. Seumas Shields strikes a. keynote when he says to Davoren: "That's the Irish people all over—they treat a joke\as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke."' These words recoil on his own head later when Maguire'is'shot in" a fight against the "Black and Tans" or the "Tommies"; whereupon Shields, irritated because Maguire did not keep a peddling appointment with him that day, remarks: "He caught something besides butterflies —two of them he got, one through each lung." Swiftly Dayoren retorts': "The Irish people are very fond of turning a serious thing into a joke; that was a serious affair—for poor Maguire.'' But Maguire had left a legacy, a closed bag, in their apartment. Suddenly, while the Black and Tans are knocking at thedoor, it-is discovered that Maguire's bag is full of Mills bombs. Pedlar and poet are alike in panic. Minnie Powell, 'romantically drawn towards the supposed gunman, protects both the men by carrying the Mills bombs into her next-door room —and they let her do it. The raiding Black and Tans find the bombs and take Minnie away on a lorry; the lorry is ambushed in the street by Irish Republicans, and Minnie, in trying to escape, is shot dead. And the shadow gunman's requiem is: "Oh Davoren, Donal Davoren, poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet!" \ He is no pandar to popular passion who will put into the mouth of Shields the words: "L believe in the freedom of' Ireland,'an' that. England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin' about dyin' for the people, wjien it's the- people that are dyin' for the gunmen!"^ It was Ireland's. turn in 1920, but the day may come when other countries' will need their Scan O'Caseys.

Professor Shelley had an attentive and appreciative audience, but to make all O'Casey's exquisitely-carved characters live is beyond the capacity of one reader. The professor was perhaps more at home as Grigson, the bombastic but shrewd drunk, than in the "straight stuff," full of deep meaning, exchanged between Davoren and Shields. Mrs. Henderson is really a portrait study all in herself, and Tommy Owens is a miniature; these, and others like them,, can hardly be conveyed by proxy. But the art of the reader may bring many new disciples to the Irish literary fold, and, if so, that will be a service inestimable. .

Professor Shelley also won applause with a number of John' Masefield • poems; The ex-Dublin labourer O'Casey and the expotboy Masefield are both twentieth century lights. All honour to their torchbearer. " '"- . .' '