A Pamphlet for the Stage
The Star Turns Red. By Sean O'Casey. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.) SINCE Mr. O'Casey deserted Ireland and stopped writing the superb tragi-comedies of Dublin life on which he made his reputation, his plays have been exasperating mixtures of the good and the ineffective. The Star Turns Red, his latest play, is a mixture in which the good is almost completely buried in the boring. It is not clear whether it is meant as militant propaganda for the Left, calling upon the workers to revolt, or as a prophetic warning of how ruin will overcome the world unless every claim of the workers is granted. This conclusion is the only part of the play which contains any ambiguity. Throughout the rest of it everything is plainly labelled and divided between simple black and white: noble workers, brutal Fascists, hypocritical officials, reactionary churchmen and the rest. These characters are the creations not of a dramatist's imagination but of a pamphleteer with a revolutionary temperament and an academic conception of life ; the plot is more or less a set piece, designed to illustrate that conception. In the writing it is only very rarely that the subtle tones of Mr. O'Casey, the author of Juno and the Paycock, pierce through the raucous accents of Mr. O'Casey the pamphleteer.
It is a commonplace that a play which is effective on the stage often seems uninteresting in print. The Star Turns Red is being performed this week on the politically sympathetic stage of the Unity Theatre, but somehow it does not seem worth while going so far to see whether one's first impressions
Previous page
