The After-Dinner Payback

The London Review of Books has an interesting, if lengthy, essay on Samuel Beckett and the Irish actors who performed his plays onstage.

[Jack] MacGowran was a lead Irish actor who could hold the stage in the central plays in the Irish repertory. But these plays were few—notably the plays of Synge and Shaw and O’Casey, and perhaps O’Neill if you agreed that he was Irish—compared to the great canon of English theatre. The Irish plays from the beginning needed a peculiar sort of actor, who could manage anti-heroic material and offer it a sort of ironic heroic edge, who could play tramps, losers, and chancers but hold the stage with them knowing that there was no king or potentate about to arrive. They were the king and the potentate. The bare landscape or the poor tenement was Troy or Elsinore. In life, the characters they played held powerless parts and walk-on roles, but now for their brief stretch on stage they were, in some sour way, lords of language. This required playing of an unusual sort, crossing absolute realism with a strange poetic glow, allowing silences and sudden shifts of tone to work a magic, allowing a strange helplessness to hit against an unforced and peculiar majesty in attitude or tone, allowing comedy to play very close to pure sadness. These actors could play Eugene O’Neill with absolute ease, but they could not play Henry IV. Although MacGowran did not play any lead roles during his time in the Abbey, he watched the lead actors, steeped in the Abbey tradition, who had made the O’Casey and the Shaw parts from scratch, and he was locked now in the dilemma facing any Irish actor from this tradition in London. One moment he was playing Eugene O’Neill to great acclaim, and immediately afterwards he was in Hollywood for Walt Disney, playing a leprechaun in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. In the words of Derek Walcott, either he was nobody or he was a nation.