New Play in Dublin

Dublin expected trouble. A new Sean O'Casey play, The Bishop's Bonfire, was coming to town--and Dublin remembered 1926. That year the Abbey Theater produced O'Casey's since famed The Plough and the Stars, an irreverent treatment of the 1916 Irish revolution. It roused Irish fury to such patriotic heights that shrieking, whistling men and women stampeded for the stage to drag the actors off. Actor Barry Fitzgerald met the first charging patriot with an uppercut that sent him flying back into the stalls. One actress threw her shoe at the attackers. It was caught and thrown back at Poet W. B. Yeats, a director of the Irish national theater, who was vainly trying to make a speech in the din. Finally the Civic Guards had to be rushed in to clear the house of the embattled theater lovers and O'Casey haters.

On opening night last week, after the 300 unreserved gallery seats were filled, a crowd of some 1,000 people milled in the streets, chanting protests at their failure to get in. At curtain time uniformed police and plainclothesmen on foot and in camouflaged radio cars surrounded the Gaiety Theater, ready for anything.

Personal Label. They had reason to expect fireworks. After the riotous premiere of The Plough, O'Casey crossed the Irish Sea to settle in England, and since then a lot of damns have flowed over the water. He has tilted with eloquence and venom at many an Irish figure and foible in his plays and in the massive six-volume autobiography poured out over the past 15 years (TIME, Nov. 15). Ireland banned four of the volumes, but the Irish theater knows no censorship. Arch-Individualist O'Casey was free last week to speak his unconventional piece from the stage.

Still stubborn and starry-eyed at 75, O'Casey refuses to give up a personal label merely because an international political conspiracy has discredited it. "I am a Communist," he told a TIME correspondent last week, and added: "They're bloody fools, these Communists. Always looking to Russia. They're too rigid. They drive me mad. They know nothing but what they read in their little pamphlets. If all the Communists were like O'Casey, Communism would be a menace to the world."

Apathetic Country. The Bishop's Bonfire, he said, "is a play about the ferocious chastity of the Irish, a lament for the condition of Ireland, which is an apathetic country now, losing all her energy, enthusiasm and resolution. The country is just drifting, with the lowest birth and marriage rates in the world . . ."

A mixture of farce and melodrama, the play is full of sweetness and vinegar. But not until the third act did O'Casey's anticlerical lines provoke the gallery into boos, hisses and shouts. When a pompous canon told some of the characters: "The Church is ashamed of you, the bishop is ashamed of you, and I am ashamed of you," somebody bellowed from the gallery, "And we are ashamed of you!" Protests also rose when O'Casey's unorthodox priest (a sympathetic character) urged a girl to seek release from her "foolish vows" of chastity.

But at the last curtain, the applause equaled the hisses and the boos, and Actor Cyril Cusack's defiant curtain speech had an air of sad anticlimax. If the evening was tamer than the famous one of 1926, it was probably because The Bishop's Bonfire failed to produce the inflammable sparks of The Plough and the Stars. In Dublin any old play with unpopular ideas can get hissed. It takes quality to cause a riot. Despite some fine comic scenes and verbal brilliance, Bonfire is only second-best O'Casey.

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