“Sean O’Casey’s Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective” by Carol Kleiman

Not only does Sean O’Casey’s Bridge of Vision reveal that Carol Kleiman is a ranking critic in her field, but also that she is capable of manifesting within her scholarship, the compassion and humanity so characteristic of the playwright she has chosen to study.

The Bridge of Vision begins with the view that Yeats’ rejection of The Silver Tassie on behalf of the Abbey Theatre in 1929 has hindered production of the later plays and clouded any attempt to evaluate O’Casey in the light of the history of modern drama. Kleiman launches into an examination of Yeats’ criticisms by setting them against the structure of the play and by setting the play itself against the surrounding dramatic milieu. The author points out that because of Yeats’ early adverse decision, O’Casey for decades was evaluated only in terms of the three Realist plays the Abbey did accept—The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. Few readers today can name anything but the Dublin Trilogy.

But a re-evaluation of O’Casey has been taking place. He is no longer blamed for being an Expressionist or leaving his earlier Realism behind. Nonetheless, as Kleiman indicates, critics have had problems integrating the pre-Tassie O’Casey with the far less orthodox playwright who followed:

If his ‘later’ manner is to be thought of, not as some wild and perverse aberration from the course of his true genius, but as a natural and spontaneous development of a maturing talent, then how was the apparent stylistic break in the O’Casey cannon to be understood? How was the apparently vast gulf in terms of technique which seemed to exist between the early plays of the Dublin trilogy and those plays from The Silver Tassie onward to be explained?

Accordingly, the “Introduction” and the first and last essays in The Bridge of Vision situate The Silver Tassie and its “mirror twin;’ Red Roses for Me, within the body of O’Casey’s own work and with respect to genre in the twentieth century.

According to Kleiman, “the label ‘Expressionist’ with all its attendant definitions, frequently blurs and distorts and…has even been used as a way of dismissing O’Casey’s work altogether.” Thus, the first essay in The Bridge of Vision redefines Expressionism as it is manifested in O’Casey. Kleiman proposes that, while he was undoubtedly influenced (both consciously and unconsciously) by continental Expressionists—like the German Ernest Toller, or the Swedish misogynist, August Strindberg—his version of the genre was especially distinctive: “homemade” is Kleiman’s word for it. Illustrating carefully from The Tassie and Red Roses, she shows a more organic relationship between the realistic and symbolic modes than critics have previously recognized. She points out, for instance, that his symbolic sets, characters, costumes and lighting effects are not nearly so abstract as Toller’s. Or again, she believes it has been a mistake to produce the nightmarish second act of The Tassie and the visionary third act of Red Roses as Strindbergian “dream structures,” since O’Casey carefully grounded them in the actual world. Throughout the book Kleiman argues that the tendency to overemphasize the Expressionistic elements in both acts and to divorce them from their Realist roots can only produce disunified plays.

In Kleiman’s view, such production decisions inhibit the impact of O’Casey’s drama. Her comparison with Toller reveals that O’Casey’s insistence on the blood and worms of life has made his art dramatically more effective. Although Kleiman may perhaps under-assess the shock-value of Toller’s work, The Bridge of Vision does convincingly argue that the German’s characters, action and theatre are simply a mouthpiece for his ideas; whereas O’Casey’s assume a life of their own. In effect, Kleiman is saying that O’Casey, with his “home-made expressionism” has discovered a way of bestowing life on a still-born genre. The implication is that unless Expressionism is grounded in reality some short-circuiting takes place between stage and audience. Kleiman’s argument provides the advantage of a double perspective: it offers a unified vision of O’Casey’s stylistic development, and it enables us to think more flexibly about the structure of his individual plays.

Kleiman’s essay on Expressionism, important in its own right, represents her concern for only part of O’Casey’s dramatic touch. The last essay in The Bridge of Vision, “A Revaluation in the Light of the Absurd,” perceptively connects O’Casey’s work and the Theatre of the Absurd and, in turn, its mirror twin, the Theatre of Cruelty. Using Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Artaud and Adamov as lenses through which to view and evaluate O’Casey—and drawing on comments by critics David Krause and R.P. Murphy—Kleiman establishes a number of striking parallels. She notes that the “knockabout” world of O’Casey, with its basic structural metaphor of “chassis” and its mutilated men, is another version of the world of Absurdist Drama. Then again: Jack and Joxer in Juno, Sylvester and Simon in The Tassie, are remarkably similar to Gogo and Didi, or even Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. If O’Casey disapproves of Ionesco for making a character into a rhinoceros, he himself—in the best Absurdist spirit—is quite capable of putting a rooster on the stage as an actual character in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Even his earliest plays exploit the duplicity and variety of language. Recognizing these qualities in O’Casey, Kleiman writes an excellent analysis of verbal repetition in Act III of The Tassie, and she makes similar connections in her argument on dialect in Red Roses. She even suggests that in Act III the appearance of Ayamonn’s head—severed by a shaft of light—demands an Absurdist staging, rather like the heads of Nag and Nell in Endgame or the Head of Winny in Happy Days. An interesting and perhaps exciting prospect…if possible! And we are also led to discover that Antonin Artaud’s concept of mis-en-scène can be applied to parts of both plays. In fact, Kleiman points out that like the Absurdists, O’Casey uses a highly formal, even ritualistic, structure to unify both these plays.

However, the author is not merely suggesting similarities between O’Casey and Absurdist Drama. She is arguing that the mode actually finds some of its possibilities in O’Casey’s work. Behind Beckett’s Hamm in his wheelchair sits O’Casey’s Harry in his. The analysis of the last scene in Juno and the Paycock—the one deleted from the Columbia Long-Playing Recording—reveals a drama stripped to its essentials and pointed towards, perhaps beyond, the Absurd. In the author’s opinion, The Tassie and especially Red Roses possess more life, more magic and more vision than Absurdist Drama. O’Casey’s work, she says, remains rooted in a sense of the permanent and the real as well as the grotesque—not unlike the Medieval Morality Play.

In The Bridge of Vision such a generic frame is tested by constructing on it a detailed consideration—sometimes line by line—of the staging of both plays: the most detailed and plausible reading that has yet been done. Especially distinguished in the essay on The Tassie is the unique description of how the Croucher should be played. Kleiman views the Croucher as a complex creation that finds its origins in Expressionism. Answering Yeats’ charges that the play lacks both unity and a dominating character, she explains that since Harry Heegan is a man crucified by the war and also the embodiment of the spirit of the war, a Christ and an anti-Christ, and since the Croucher manifests all of these identities, Harry becomes the dominating force throughout the play. To clarify the dramatic structure, Kleiman suggests the “doubling” of Harry and the Croucher and even the overt identification of the two near the end of Act II—but not until then. The audience’s firm recognition of Harry in the Croucher must not come too soon. It must be made to anticipate Harry’s arrival—as it did in Act I—and to search for Harry in the faces of the group of battle torn soldiers who include Barney and a soldier “very like Teddy.” Such production suggestions are supported by details in O’Casey’s manuscripts, by Raymond Massey’s staging in the 1929 Apollo production, and by Kleiman’s own convincing speculations about the emotional reactions of the audience.

Unfortunately, the essay on Red Roses is not nearly so convincing. Certainly the analysis of the clothes and colour imagery and the transformation scene are well done. And the suggestion that the concluding act elevates the play beyond a modern Miracle Play to the status of a modern Passion Play is an exciting notion. However, Kleiman has not adequately dealt with the major problem in Red Roses: the highly rhetorical, sometimes bombastic language. It is difficult to accept Kleiman’s proposal that O’Casey uses it to satirize the idealistic pretensions of the characters as well as to carry the symbolic meaning when we discover such dialogue spoken by a coarse and brutal character like Inspector Finglas. As representative of an oppressive church and state, he is surely no idealist, nor poet like Anamonn. Even Kleiman herself admits he uses “exaggerated poetic language.” At times O’Casey’s high-blown phrasing becomes so extravagant it bears little connection to setting and character.

In this chapter O’Casey’s work strains under the weight of Kleiman’s argument. She is hard pressed, for example, to reveal the integration of Expressionism and Realism throughout the first two acts. Nor are the defects of The Bridge of Vision confined to the Red Roses essay. While the prose is often good, at times it loses energy; at other times it is tainted by clichés such as “vast gulf,” “coming to grips,” “Christlike” and “explore the outermost reaches.” The most serious problems in the book, however, result from overlooking, or at least minimizing O’Casey’s limitations. Though Kleiman argues her case very well, she is unconvincing about the dramatic viability of the Visitor in the second act of The Tassie. She is no more persuasive on O’Casey’s use of numbers to represent people and to emphasize the impersonal nature of the military enterprise in the following act. Both instances show “overkill” on O’Casey’s part—places where his Expressionism has lost touch with its “homespun” quality.

Nevertheless, Kleiman is surely right when she says it is necessary to see the scenes staged as she suggests before making a firm judgment. In fact, part of the reason for her book is to stimulate production more in keeping with the spirit of O’Casey’s later drama. By generically classifying the later O’Casey more precisely and more completely than has yet been done she makes that more likely. The Bridge of Vision is not the first attempt to perform such a task; nor the first to speak of the mythic and visionary dimensions of O’Casey (Kleiman herself is careful to praise David Krause; one thinks additionally of Winifred Smith’s “The Dying God in The Modern Theatre” and of much of the work that has appeared in The Sean O’Casey Review.) Still, her answers to Yeats and the problems raised by both The Tassie and Red Roses seem the most balanced, most carefully researched and most detailed to date. The end notes are a mine of information and the photographs of earlier productions interesting.

The Bridge of Vision is an important contribution to Irish Studies. It elaborates a sane perspective from which to view the later O’Casey and the result is, as the book’s title suggests, a bridge of vision. By the inclusion of production notes on both plays in an appendix, Carol Kleiman appears to be daring a director to work out her views on the stage. Has the twentieth century neglected and undervalued O’Casey’s later work? Richard Ouzounian, are you listening? ■

Daniel Lenoski is a published critic in Irish Studies. He teaches English at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba.