The Silver Tassie. The Irish Theatre, [nc., whose roster includes Scans, Culinans, MacGuffins, Ennises, Miceals, Patricks, Liams and Unas, whose sponsors include Llewellyn Powys, Donn Byrne's widow and Otto Hermann Kahn, have taken over the tiny but gallant Greenwich Village Theatre where for their first production of the season they present a haunting, chaotic play by famed Sean 0'Casey of Dublin, author of Juno and the Paycock (TIME, March 29, 1926). Through its symbolism and its brogue you discern the simple story of an Irish footballer who went to war and returned paralyzed below the waist. He then had to roll himself about in a wheel chair while his erstwhile love cuddled another boy. In the meantime a profound and troublous scene has occurred. Avoiding the acute battlefront description of such books as All Quiet on the Western Front, such plays as Journey's End, Playwright O'Casey reveals a group of infantrymen encamped in a ruined apse behind the lines. There they sing songs of war—not bawdy ditties or rousing marches, but strange and awesome chants. This lyricism, now solo, now antiphonal, now choral, is a poetic, formalized utterance. The diction is abominable—words can only be guessed at—but the import of these Gaelic spirituals can be felt. Mystic and throbbing, they express the soldiers' gruesome mission and man's revolt from the ghastliness he has made for himself.
The rest is frequently moving realism, always hampered by bad locution. But what you will remember is the ghostly burthen of fear and futility borne by the voices of shadowy warriors.
Ladies of the Jury. What theatregoer with a nose for situations would not tingle at the comic possibilities of women doing jury duty? In the first act of this play, in which a murder trial begins, Mrs. Fiske is to be observed as a lorgnetted, matronly juror.
Her misapprehension of court procedure, her harassing interruptions and questions, so acutely demonstrate the feminine at its silliest that men in the audience writhe in remembrance, everybody laughs, high comedy is anticipated.
But in the last two acts, acted in the jury room, the spirit languishes. For Mrs. Fiske's absurd first-act character becomes a smart, dominating woman, and what was almost wicked satire becomes burlesque. The jury is shown in impromptu sleeping regalia. Two lovers are interrupted at their devotions by the snores of a red-headed Irishwoman. There are two crusty moralists, a conventionally exploited Scotsman, a maundering poet—all the stencils of farce, with a brace of beauties thrown in for good measure.
Mrs. Fiske's rapid, casual delivery's, as ever, expert and sometimes unintelligible. Of the tricks of emphasis and accent she is still past-mistress. In this disappointing play she is accompanied by another oldtimer, Wilton Lackaye, who made mesmerist Svengali famous (Trilby, 1895), who returns, after a three-year illness, to do an excellent bit as the exasperated Judge.