Courage needed to tackle "Gunman"

FOR over sixty 60 years now, Sean O'Casey's first three plays have been more, or less in constant production in the Irish theatre. And in all of that time there has been to my knowledge precisely one major professional production - Garry Hynes's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey in 1991 - that tried to approach them with a mind uncluttered by naturalistic conventions and accumulated habits of interpretation. Joe Dowling's superb productions of The Plough and Juno and the Paycock in the late 1980s took the traditional approach as far as it could go. Yet there seems to be no real desire to ask fresh questions of the texts.

If you did want to be brave, The Shadow of a Gunman, now at the Gate, would be a good place to start, for the simple reason that it is a minor work, one that no longer really works in the old terms anyway. It is a strangely self lacerating play, having at its heart one of the most unflattering self portraits ever committed to the stage. Its anti hero Donal Davoren, proletarian autodidact and slum poet, is virtually a portrait of the artist as a young poltroon. As an alter ego, Davoren casts a sickly light on O Casey's own tormented involvements with militant Irish nationalism. The playwright shows himself up as a man who had affected the glamour of violence while being, at heart, a coward.

This makes the play, for all its use of the public events of 1920, a curiously private piece. It is more a psychodrama than a national epic, more confessional than political. Compared to Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars it is irredeemably small scale. Although written by a man well into his 40s, it has the air of an adolescent work, full of the solipsistic obsession of a young writer who thinks the world is to be found in his own emotions.

The self contempt made manifest in Davoren infects all of the other characters too. Even Minnie Powell, the single person on stage who is not contemptible, is greatly reduced by the fact that her heroic self sacrifice is offered on the altar of a singularly unworthy idol, Davoren himself. A grey film of futility lies over everything. Unlike The Plough and Juno, there is no counterbalancing image of human worth to put in the scales with fecklessness and timidity. One way to rescue the play might be to look at it backwards, through, for instance, Beckett. Its outstanding difficulty is its parade of buffoons: Tommy Owens, Mrs Henderson, Mr Gallogher, Adolphus Grigson.

They are there to be laughed at, and yet they are no laughing matter. Each has enough reality to make us identify with them, or at least recognise them, so that mere laughter seems uncomfortably inadequate.

In a naturalistic play, this contradiction cannot be resolved, and there is a real danger that the characters end up being too risible to be sympathetic, too pitiful to raise a laugh. In Beckett or Ionesco, though, the same problem is turned into a strength. Realism and farce are collapsed into each other; characters are trapped in endless comic routines; we laugh at and identify with them at the same time.

Lynne Parker's production seems tempted by some such possibility. Kathy Strachan's set hints at an abstract expressionist pattern, in the naturalistic images of damp and decay. Barry Barnes's Davoren is dressed in what look like Oscar Wilde's cast offs, suggesting that we are to see him more as a symbolic image of a Poet than as a "real" character. Maureen Potter's Mrs Henderson and Des Keogh's, Mr Gallogher are played, to some effect, more as music hall performers than as attempts at vaguely credible slum dwellers. Martin Murphy's Grigson is a self conscious stage Orangeman, played, yet again, with an Ulster accent, missing the point that the Protestants in O'Casey's plays are working class Dubliners like himself.

Much of this is, nevertheless, brave and intelligent, and it shows an awareness of the need to rethink the play. The problem, though, is that having pushed the boat out to this extent, the rest of the production never really climbs aboard, leaving these broadly expressionistic elements adrift on a sea of familiar naturalism. Owen Roe's Seumas Shields, much the strongest performance on offer, is a convincing but conventional characterisation in a style quite different to Barnes's declamatory Davoren. And all of O'Casey's stage business, much of it the ploddingly mechanical contrivance of a playwright still coming to grips with his craft, is left intact. The result of this uncomfortable mixture of styles is actually to accentuate some of the play's weaknesses, adding a second layer of uncertainty to O'Casey's own.

The moral of the story is that there really is no point in continuing to stage these plays, especially The Shadow of a Gunman, unless a director has something new to say and is prepared to pursue it with remorseless vigour. To do, in other words, what O'Casey himself did when he recognised the awkwardness of realistic forms and pushed beyond them into wilder and riskier territories.