Contemporary Arts
THEATRE
The Bishop's Bonfire. By Scan O'Casey. (Gaiety Theatre, Dublin.)
'Luca an International night,' said somebody, 'when Ireland has been beaten I2-3.' That is a fairly good assessment of the feelings of dis- appointment at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Monday, when the final curtain fell on The Bishop's Bonfire. Dublin audiences are not in- clined to be over-generous—they contain tdo many unsuccessful playwrights, But O'Casey is too big to be anybody's rival, and the,packed house certainly hoped that his first Dublin pre- miere for twenty-nine years would also launch his greatest triumph since The Plough and the Stars. But, by the end, the verdict was obvious. The Bishop's Bonfire is not even the rough notes for a good play. 'A sermon in the comic manner' is the description of it given by Cyril Cusack, who is responsible for the pro- duction. The sermon, alas, swallows up the comedy, leaving only a few welcome cases of laughter. The play is set in the Irish village of Ballyoona, which is expecting a visit from a local boy who has become a bishop. The local Canon and his principal henchman, Coun- cillor Reiligan, are preparing to receive the great man in style. The dramatic interest, such as it is, centres on the councillor's two con- trasted daughters—Keelin (the Light One), who loves a spineless young labourer, and Foorawn (the Cold One), who is dedicated to religion but is loved by the young man who manages the councillor's farm. The play is a tract, directed against the Holy Willies who blight young lives in the name of religion; but the writer knows only the headlines of the modern Ireland which he is trying to lecture, and both his analysis and his character- drawing arc, inevitably, superficial. To point the moral, there are two commentators : a rambling old man called the Codger (played by Cyril Cusack), and the young curate, Father Boheroe (the name means 'Red Road'), the most obnoxious type of 'understanding' cleric. Through these O'Casey transmits hazily and at length his message, which seems to be that life itself can be a form of worship. Dramatically, the play scarcely exists; it has neither construction nor movement. When, at the end, Foorawn is shot dead by her lover, there is no more tragic impact that when Punch kills Judy. Even the people who came to pro- test against O'Casey's anti-clericalism had a thin time of it. They could scarcely find a line to boo until the third act; then, alarmed at the thought that they might have spent six hours in the queue for nothing, they raised a feeble noise, which had the admirable effect of stimulating the rest of the house into vigorous and prolonged applause when the curtain fell.
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