Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london

Follow @theatreguidelon

 The Theatreguide.London Review

In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others by streaming new shows, and various online archives preserve still more vintage productions. Even as things return to normal we continue to review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.

The Shadow Of A Gunman
PBS 1972  and Marquee.tv   May 2023

Sean O'Casey's drama is set in Dublin in 1920, when bloody skirmishes between the IRA and the British army were almost daily occurrences.

The inhabitants of a boarding house somehow get the idea that a fellow tenant, a harmless poet, is an IRA gunman in hiding, and treat him like a hero. The lads idolise him, the girls fall for him, and the older people treat him with deference and respect.

He enjoys the adulation until someone's speaking too freely leads to a British raid and someone else sacrifices their life to protect him, and the seriousness of his self-indulgence hits hard.

While the play centres on the false hero, its real subject is the surrounding atmosphere, and the soul-battering experience of living in a war zone, so that you come to hate your own side almost as much as the enemy because all you really want is peace and safety.

So the play is really about what it was like to be in a specific place at a specific time, and its success depends on creating a sense of that time and place.

This production was made for American television, and it looks like it. The cast is drawn from television (Frank Converse), Hollywood (Richard Dreyfuss), Broadway (Allyn Ann McLerie) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (Jack MacGowran).

No one is less than competent, but no one speaks with the same accent, moves their hands and bodies in the same manner, or in any real way appears to inhabit the same reality.

The tall blond Converse looks like a displaced California surfer, while the authentically Irish MacGowran plays so very very Oirish as to approach self-parody.

(To be fair, O'Casey lays the Oirishness on pretty thickly at points, so it is difficult to avoid self-parody.)

Everyone's heart is in the right place, but no one is in the same place, and under the constraints of television production director Joseph Hardy is unable to bring them together.

This production makes the plot clear and gives some hints of its themes. But it is the shadow of O'Casey's play, with too little body.

Return to Theatreguide.London home page.

Review of The Shadow Of A Gunman (PBS 1972) - May 2023