The Shadow Of A Gunman

THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN - Sean O'Casey

The Shadow of a Gunman is the first play in Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923 - James Joyce's Ulysses had been published the year before. It is set in 1920, as the War of Independence rages. The other two Dublin plays are Juno and the Paycock [Peacock], and The Plough and the Stars, the latter of which caused a riot when first performed at the Abbey because nationalists in the audience resented O'Casey's hostile portrayal of the revolutionaries of the 1916 Easter Rising.

Dominic Dromgoole's revival of The Shadow of a Gunman is at the Tricycle Theatre in London's Kilburn, long an Irish ghetto, where during the 70s and 80s the local public houses were full of IRA fund-raisers. Clearly Dromgoole wants the play to resonate with Kilburn's own history. The key event in the play is a Black and Tan raid in the middle of the night on a tenement house: the sense of what it is like to be caught up in a war between guerrilla fighters and an occupying army is evoked with extraordinary economy. How many wars of national liberation have there been in the last eighty years, how many raids, how many innocents killed? The mind shies away from these questions.

O'Casey said that the play:

is built on the frame of Shelley's phrase [from 'Prometheus Unbound']

"Ah me! Alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!"

Indeed the line is quoted in the opening moments of the play. This suggests the play is a tragedy, and indeed it is. It ends with the death of a brave and innocent girl, Minnie Powell (wonderfully performed by Jane Murphy, making her first appearance on the professional stage). All the characters seem hopelessly trapped in circumstances from which they cannot escape. Every character (even Minnie's perhaps) is fatally flawed. No good, it seems, can come of anything they do, and the violence that surrounds them invades their lives whether they want it to or not.

At the same time the play is a comedy. Indeed something like ninety per cent of it consists of a seemingly unending series of comic sketches. As in Beckett and Joyce, one can sense the constant influence of the music hall. The comedy is all at the expense of the foibles of the Irish - their inability to be tidy, clean, or punctual; their addiction to long words; their drunkenness and wife beating; their sentimentality and political naпvetй; their love of literature and song - so if the play wasn't written, directed, and performed by Irish people one could hardly but suspect it of racism. This is the world of TV's Father Ted, but with 'real' violence instead of slapstick. As Seumas says (and Donal says much the same thing later):

That's the Irish People all over - they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.

There's no reason why a tragedy shouldn't also be a comedy - Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore is surely both. But the comedy has to be black, and a good deal of this comedy is actually rather sentimental. At one moment the play seems bitter and angry and its message is summed up in the cry (repeated more than once):

Oh this is a hopeless country!

But at another we are being invited to admire the pluckiness of the characters, their ability to survive and even flourish in impossible circumstances, their quest for truth, their "devotion", as O'Casey himself says of the central figure, the poet Donal Davoren, quoting Shaw:

to "the might of design, the mystery of colour, and the belief in the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting."

So there's a case for saying that the central weakness of the play is that it can't decide whether it admires or hates the characters it presents. But one could also redescribe this as its strength. O'Casey sees both the best and the worst of the world he portrays, and he sees that the two are inseparably connected with each other: fecklessness, sentimentality, violence, indomitability, and love of poetry all bound up together, each feeding on the others.

O'Casey himself had received almost no formal education, had worked as a labourer, had lived in great poverty, had been active in nationalist politics and had despaired of nationalism. He was forty-two when his first play, this play, was accepted for the stage. He is describing a world he is struggling to escape from, belongs to, and can't get free of. Twelve years later he was to leave Ireland for the last time - he lived twenty-nine years in England without returning. Donal Davoren is "poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet." O'Casey, as soon as he had established himself as a playwright, seems to have been eager to leave the poltroons behind him.

Perhaps the most important feature of the play is that it portrays a shadowland. Donal's poetry is clearly dreadful. His roommate has become a local figure of fun because he spends hours selling a single packet of hairpins. Young Tommy Owens wants to die for his country, but hasn't the courage to fight for it. Minnie Powell