SEAN O’CASEY —
the unforgetable bard

| of common folk

s O’Casey is dead, The
great playwright and poet of
the common people, the rebel,
the fighter, the lark in the clean
air is no more,

“Man is the only life on earth
that can see its form and love its
€randeur,” wrote O’Casey in his
last book, Under a Colored Cap,

He has enriched the world, for
Without him it would have no
Meaning and look dead; it would
be dead,

“He has ennobled the star we
Stand on; exceptional souls give
things exceptional beauty,”

Which now of our surviving
Sreat writers or playwrights in
the West could today write such
Words, sunk as so many of them
are in disenchantment and de-
Spair?

“?’m more of a Communist now
than I ever was,” he said at his
84th birthday only a few months
480, And in this philosophy lay
his Strength and his undying op-
imism, He was a man of the
New age,

* *

O’Casey had good reason to be
4 rebel from his earliest years,
© was the last of 13 children
born into a Protestant family,
€ lived in a Dublin slum whose
Squalor and hideousness . few
People can nowadays imagine,

His father died when he was
Still a child, He was har¢ly edu-
ated at all, suffering from ill-
ess and bad eyesight, and started
© earn a living at 3s 6d a week
@boring and navvying,

But even in those early days
is spirit was great and he re-
Solutely began his task of edu-

fees

Some facts on
Olympic Village

he Olympic Village in

Tokyo that will house
Officials and athletes
Sprawls over an area of 165
acres, Originally built 18
years ago to accommodate
the families of U.S, military
Personnel, it was vacated
last year and Japanese |,
Olympic organizers have
been giving the place a face
lifting and adding extra fa-
Cilities,

It is estimated that the
Village will have a daytime
Population of 14,000, It is
Composed of 249 independent
two storey wood and mortar
tiled houses with 12 different
Sized apartments for a total
Of 543 units, There are also
14 four storey concrete bar-
Tack buildings,

The village has a total of
3,124 rooms and is expected
to accommodate 6,800 offi-
Cials and athletes, Since itis
More than a mile wide, 500
bicycles will be available
and buses will make the
Tounds of the 24 miles of
Toads within the village
Every ‘five to 15 minutes,

After the Olympics, the
be nblex is to be demolished
om ark,

ake way for a pi

cating himself, reading the clas-
sics, discovering Shakespeare
and later, to his great joy, Ber-
nard Shaw,

He was closely attached to the
Irish movement, He became a
member of the Gaelic League, the
Irish Republican Brotherhood and
for a time was secretary of the
Irish Citizens’ Army,

He was a great admirer of Jim
Larkin, the Irish labor leader,
and believed in the unity of the
Irish and the workingclass move-
ment,

Apart from his writings in
‘labor journals, O’Casey’s first
writings were published in 1916,
His second book, a history of the
Irish Citizens’ Army, appearing
in 1919.

In 1923 the Abbey Theatre ac-
cepted his play The Shadow of a
Gunman and there opened that
great creative period in his life
that produced such masterpieces
as Juno and the Paycock and The
Plough and the Stars,

In this self-educated writer
from working-class Dublin, who
had been able to afford only two
visits to the theatre before he
began writing, the Abbey dis-
covered a young genius,

* * *

O’Casey was to flower into the
last and most brilliant product
of the Irish dramatic renais-
sance,

His use of the English lan-
guage, withits vitality and poetry,
was unequalled by any other
writer of his day,

The Shadow of a Gunman, root-
ed. in O’Casey’s own life and

‘Iguana.

“The Night of the Iguana.” Di-
rected by John Huston. Screenplay
by Anthony Veiller and Huston
from the play of the same name by
Tennessee Williams Showing in
Vancouver at the Capitol-.and in
New Westminster at the Para-
mount.

ight of the Iguana contrives

to save a good portion of
those elements that have en-
deared Williams to Broadway—
exotic torments, exotic sexuality
and a heavy sweet mysticism,

A couple of entertaining se-
quences have been added, ...
The resultant mishmash is bol-
stered by the genius of Huston as
director, Richard Burton as per-
former and: the work of Mexican
cameraman Gabriel Figueroa,

We have, then, Burton as the
-ex-minister, sliding down the
road to hell via drink and amen-
tal collapse, He has been reduced
to the status of a tour guide in
Mexico; The Rev, T. Lawrence

Shannon, “a man of God guides
you through God’s churches,”

His clients are a gruesome
clutch of ladies from the “Bap-
tist Women’s College” in Texas.,

See
experience, early displayed his
eloquence combined with his love
of comedy, his hatred of hypoc-
risy, oppression and social in-
justice,

The general philosophy of the
plays he was to write later was
*the bewilderment and horror at
one section of the community
trying to murder 4nd kill the
other,” It was a theme central
to all his plays of this period,

His first play brought him less
than, 4, There followed Juno and
the Paycock, for which he re-
ceived X 25, and then The Plough
and the Stars,

It was this play which produced
riots at its fourth performance
at the Abbey, Set among the de-
caying Dublin tenements during
the week of the 1916 uprising,
O’Casey offended the Irish chau-
vinists, ‘the philistines and sen-
timentalists with his unsparing
picture of reality, It was bit-
terly attacked,

His next play, The Silver Tas-
sie, an anti-war experimental
play, and a departure in style
from his previous realism, was
rejected by the Abbey while he
was in England in 1928, This
fatal act precipitated O’Casey’s
exile and break with the Abbey,

These first plays secured for
O’Casey a place among the great
dramatists of the century, His
working-class characters with
their rich speech and warm hu-
manity were new people on the
stage, realist creations that not
only in those days brought the
common people into the theatre,
but spoke for a theatre of the
future, ‘

Sean O’Casey

At the age of 70, O’Casey’s was an artist who was never

The Bishop’s Bonfire was pro-
duced in Dublin and aroused
nearly as much uproar as his
early plays,

The old fighter was still at his
tricks, The play was anti-clerical
but not anti-religious, It was,
said O’Casey, “a play about the
ferocious chastity of the Irish,
a lament for the conditions of
Ireland, which is an apathetic
country now, losing all her ener-
gy, enthusiasm and resolution,”

It has long been fashionable in
some circles to decry O’Casey’s
later works, to bemoan his in-
sistence on expressing through
his plays his forthright beliefs,
But the vitality of these latter
plays put the bulk of the work
produced on the British stage to
shame, so pale and bloodless
does it appear in comparison,

His. brilliant volumes of biog-
raphy (now available in paper-
back) brought him unstinted
praise for the marvellous writing
they contain, But his essays in
which he takes up cudgels with
his detractors and critics have
often upset and infuriated those
whom he attacked, For O’ Casey

is all-around waste

Among them a blond child Gue
Lyon) who does her puerile best
to seduce him, In the resultant
scandal he is exposed as a de-
frocked scoundrel, takes refuge
at a ramshackle hotel in Puerta
Vallarta and gives in tohysteria,

The hotel is run by acharacter
named Maxine impersonated with
more fragility than lust by Ava
Gardner, She longs for Burton,
Burton longs to be freed of his
drunken torment, Enter the spin-
ster from Nantucket — Deborah
Kerr and her 97 year old
grandfather, who is the world’s
oldest living poet,

Miss Kerr acts as a sort of
spiritual catalyst to convince
Burton of his capacity to love
and grandfather’s last poem gives
us the message: every “bird?
needs a “nest” in someone’s
heart, Burton recognizes his
“nest,” Miss Gardner recognizes
hers and Miss Kerr leaves
quietly,

Thus in a matter of minutes,
our anguished hero is allowed to
stop sliding into hell and ride off
into the sunset instead,

We have a suspicion he wasn’t

really suffering at all: Burton’s
performance disdains the origin-
al Williams and his pathetic hand-
wringing,

~ Burton is sardonic and con-
trolled, his hysterics are cal-
culated, it’s impossible to feel
contempt for him, He is clearly
a decent fellow and deserves to
be happy, Williams simply im-
agined a sick hero, on’t believe
him, , Burton, in short, stands
outside the role,

The direction has a vigor that
belies the original and frequent-

Ava Gardner

above the battle,

After the last war he played a
great part in the struggle for
peace and against nuclear weap-
ons, For a while he was on the
editorial board of the Daily Work-
er and wrote regularly for the
paper,

The working-class and the pro-
gressive movement and theatre
has lost a great friend and cham-
pion,

Is there a better way to end
than to quote from the closing
words of his biography Sunset
and Evening Star:

“A drink first! What would he
drink to—the past, the present,
the future? To all of them, He
would drink to the life that em-
braced the three of them!

“Here with whitened hair, de-
Sires failing, strength ebbing out
of him, with the sun gone down,
and only with the serenity and
the calm of the evening star left
to him, he drank to Life, to all
it had been, to what it was, to
what it would be, Hurrah!”

—Jack Sutherland

of talent

ly contradicts the film-script it-
self; a fight on the beach between
two young Mexicans and a hulking
young Texan; a lovely, brief view
of a Mexican community—women
and children—on the river bank,
The camera captures the heat and
the jungle with a clarity that
makes Williams’ poetic mysti-
cism seem moody and muddy
indeed,

* * *

In sum, it is a film where the
original vehicle is at odds with
the screenplay, the Screenplay is
at odds with the tough-minded
direction and, since Huston was
partially responsible for the
adaptation, the result is a weird
Sierra Madre,” and Southern
Comfort,

The film is also at odds with
the monumental publicity attend-
ant on the lives of its principals
from Miss Lyon who has neither
talent norstyle to Burton who has
more than enough,

With this in mind the enter-
prise strikes us as a calculating
boondoggle and the only sadness
is the waste of a fine director,
an extraordinary performer anda
superb cameraman,

—N.S. (People’s Wor'd)

October 9, 1964—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 9