THEATRE

FURNISHING TRADE WORKERS IN SHORTER By a Leeds Furniture Worker (NUFTO) POSTERITY BE DAMNED — Dominic Behan — Metropolitan Irish Theatre, Edgware Road, London Proletarian plays are all the rage just now. Fortunately for those concerned with the production and the profits, the audiences have been dominantly non-working class, and this includes those of the Theatre Royal, Stratford, quaintly situated in the East End of London. But on the opening night of Dominic Behan’s play, the Irish audience in the ‘gods’ avenged many insults.

This is neither a good nor a bad play, because it isn’t a play. People’s random actions in a pub, consisting largely in drinking, superlative and hypocritical talk, occasional maudlin or patriotic singing, all of which is formlessly thrown together, do not constitute drama. One searches in vain for the integrating backbone, and because the author describes himself as an ‘angry mature man whose job as: playwright is to fight social evil’, one must assume that the bits and pieces about the IRA are meant to constitute the kernel of the work. Ridicule of the IRA and its methods is not a new theme to Irish drama. The hero of this piece dies symbolically amidst the dust-bins, crying to Mother Ireland to get off his back. Previously he had complained of her bad breath constantly before his face.

If this chaos is intended to suggest the confusion of Irish political life, it succeeds only in being itself confused. With every character in a permanent or semi-permanent alcoholic stupor, the impression that the chaos stems from the degeneracy of the people, is unpleasantly strong.

Although there was wit and boisterous fun, the author seems still to be groping for his medium. The influences of Brecht and early O’Casey are ill-digested, and those of brother Behan far too obvious.

Dramatists on the left yearn for ‘the people’ to participate in their plays. Monday night’s Irish audience still know that the role of an audience is not fulfilled by mere polite applause. And so they laughed, abused, ridiculed and drowned the playwright’s curtain speech, surely providing an experience to the inveterate first-nighters who had come down ‘to Harlem in ermine and pearls’.

‘Is there any sober man in Ireland?’ cried an Irish voice. ‘Only an imperialist country would allow such a play to be put on’, called another. And afterwards a bard spoke on the wet pavements: ‘What human beings spend 24 hours a day: in a pub? So-called artistic and literary geniuses dish us up this trash. It’s an insult to human dignity.’ There is dignity left in Ireland, but Dominic Behan has yet to discover it.

BENITA TEPER.

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