THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN. To 18 November.
Glasgow
THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN
by Sean O’Casey
Citizens’ Theatre To 18 November 2006
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Audio-described 16 Nov
Captioned 15 Nov
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
www.citz.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 November
Brief but powerful revival.
At first, it looks typically Citz. Sean O’Casey’s shared tenement-room setting becomes an open stage, a huge brick wall at its rear, half-visible words across it. But Colin Richmond’s design perfectly complements Philip Breen’s production, which finds vigour and humanity in the characters’ fears and illusions.
Michael Glenn Murphy is the would-be poet his neighbours admiringly take for an IRA hitman, while Cara Kelly gives unusual prominence to the neighbour Mrs Grigson in her patient attempts to manage her husband, the drunken Protestant boor Adolphus, while keeping up respectable pretences. It’s fitting she finally appears like a black Virgin-figure standing with news of Minnie Powell’s fate, as Donal and his room-mate Seumas (Ciaran McIntyre, excellent) kneel in grief or prayer.
Murphy and Kelly were the heart of last year’s outstanding Citz revival of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney; they bring equal strength here. Donal is someone around whom things happen; his sexual interest in Minnie encourages her to build patriotic dreams around her image of him, while his incapacity for action keeps leading him back to Shelley, a poet whose rebellious idealism had an influence hard now to imagine.
The stage’s openness reflects both the huddled tenement world with its limited privacy, and the vulnerability clear as the Black-and-Tans search the building, gratuitously wrecking everything. Eventually it allows Stuart Jenkins’ lighting to reveal the patriotic assertion on the rear wall.
Breen points up the comedy inherent in people’s illusions, not only at obvious places like the reading of Mr Gallogher’s letter to the IRA, but in Minnie’s excuse for visiting Donal. Terri Chandler is hardly the “poor little Minnie Powell” described, but convincingly gives the young woman a strong vitality.
All this, with Donal and Seumas’s hushed nocturnal conversation in the central scene (especially finely played), illuminates both O’Casey’s awareness of ridiculous, empty ideals and his sympathy for people in a world where, as Seumas says with Falstaffian insight, talk of gunmen dying for the people covers the reality that people die for the gunmen. Breen and his company ensure the play’s brevity is far from making it a slight piece.
Donal Davoren: Michael Glenn Murphy
Seumas Shields: Ciaran McIntyre
Maguire/Auxiliary: Daniel Abelson
Mr Mulligan/Mr Gallogher: Philip Gaudin
Minnie Powell: Terri Chandler
Tommy Owens: Aidan O’Hare
Mrs Henderson: Julia Dearden
Mrs Grigson: Cara Kelly
Adolphus Grigson: Fintan McKeown
with Martin O’Neill, Alan Ward, Paul Williams
Director: Philip Breen
Designer: Colin Richmond
Lighting: Stuart Jenkins
Composer: Matilda Brown
2006-11-13 00:05:28