STAGE AND SCREEN
The Theatre
"Within the Gates." By Sean O'Casey. At the Royalty Theatre
Within the Gates is a twentieth-century morality play, with its setting in a London park. It is an attempt to transcend the naturalism of the common world, as Aeschylus and Ibsen did, and as Mr. O'Neill has tried to do, by raising the moral and social problems of the individual and group on to a universal, almost a mythological, plane. It is written in the idioms of common speech, of poetic prose and of verse : and it is noticeable that though Mr. O'Casey gives most of his characters a cockney accent, the cadences of dialogue are the cadences of Irish speech that Were brought into the theatre by Synge and Mr. Yeats. He makes use of music and of dancing. The play turns from broad comedy to tragedy, from the symbolical to the naturalistic, from the actual to the fanciful. It is both proletarian and propagandist, by which I do not imply that its object is political proselytism ; I mean, in the first place, that it considers and criticizes society from the point of view of the disestablished and, in the second, that it points towards a regeneration of the society satirized, based on a new and integral faith in life. The absence of that faith I take to be Mr. O'Casey's theme.
The action of the play spans the year in four scenes : Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. It opens with a chorus of boys and girls singing a hymn to the earth, and ends with the dirge of a group of Down-and-Outs. The characters are given no names ; for the most part they are social symbols, though the fusion of the individual in the type has left them with a human identity. There is the smug Bishop, bent on mixing with the common people in the park, who interferes wherever he is not resisted and, when he is appealed to for assistance by a prostitute, first threatens to hand her over to the police for soliciting,, and _then, when he learns that she is his daughter, can administer only the formal consolation of a- convent ; the Young -Whore, whose life is threatened by a failing heart, singing wildly in the face of despair ; the Dreamer, a pale revolutionary, who bids her sing and dance through life ; the Atheist who has taken her in childhood from the security of an institution, and then abandoned her ; the drunken Old Woman, the prostitute's mother, who tries to shake her to death because she refuses her money, and comes to posture at the foot of a war memorial ; the Bishop's forbidding sister ; the Chair Attendants, the Nursemaids, the Guardsman, the Salvation Army Officers ; and the group of Down-and-Outs, whose chant dominates the play and reaches a climax in the winter's twilight at the end, when the Young Whore dies at the I3ishop's feet. Their chant and the Dreamer's comment on it illustrate the play's theme :
We challenge life no more, no more, with our dead faith and our dead hope We carry furled the fainting flags of a dead hope and a dead faith. Day sings no song, neither is there room for rest beside night in her sleeping : We've but a sigh for a song, and a deep sigh for a drum-boas:
with the Dreamer's reply :
Sorrow and pain we shall have, and struggle unending : We shall weave courage with pain, and fight through the struggle unending. Way for the strong and the-swift and the fearless : Life that-is atired with the fear of its life, let it die ; Let it sink down, let it die, aaid pass from our vision forever!
Mr. O'Casey's play is experimental in technique, and Mr. Norman Macdermott's production is experimental also. The grouping of his actors, the extremely impressive settings, the effective lighting, and the excellent control of the dance- movements do much to assist belief, and the method of intoning which some of the actors have adopted does much to diminish it. " The monotony of Miss Marie Ault's delivery exposed the poverty of much of the Old Woman's part, and robbed it of some of its merits, and. the formal elegance of Sir Basil Bartlett's Dreamer revealed the conception of the part as an abstraction, if an interesting one. Mr. Douglas Jefferies played the Bishop with simplicity and precision, disclosing in the process the limitatiOns of a character isolated from the rest by a violently naturalistic cOneeption. Miss Marjorie Mars, in a brilliant performance as the Young Whore, was alone completely successful in her part. The interest of Mr. O'Casey's subject, his courage in attempting to deal with it and the promise of his methods are unfortunately in advance of his achievement. He has attempted to combine the elements of drama to produce a single effect, not merely to illumine one another by contrast, and they have not always been properly compounded : there is no unity of impression. And too often one was aware that it was the music and rhythm of Mr. O'Casey's language and not the meaning of his words that were used to sustain attention.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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