[In the following review of the London premiere of The Shadow of a Gunman, the critic focuses on O'Casey's dramatic technique, observing that the play's comedic overtones undermines its tragic dénouement.]

One assumes that Mr. Sean O'Casey's method of setting his tragedy against a pattern of jokes is not due to ignorance of the difficulties involved but is a deliberate device to heighten the effect of the catastrophe. In The Shadow of a Gunman the tragic ending is effective enough when it arrives, but it is not sufficiently prepared, or perhaps too subtly, so that the audience has got itself into a thoroughly rollicking mood (sustained by Mr. Arthur Sinclair's broad diverting humour) and refuses to smile but must needs laugh aloud at everything. The discerning, who in the Second Act begin to see the drift of the playwright's plan, are necessarily grieved. However, I think Mr. O'Casey must share some of the blame for that.

Donal Davoren, a young poet—whether good or bad it was not easy to determine, as Mr. Harry Hutchinson persistently read his verses to the backcloth—is sharing a room in the distraught Dublin of 1920 with a vulgar feckless pedlar, Seumas Shields. The other denizens of the tenement have decided that Donal is a gunman on the run, which flatters the boy's vanity and helps him to retain the admiration of that sturdy patriot, pretty little Minnie Powell. When the house is raided by the “auxiliaries,” Minnie takes the bag of bombs which some casual member of the I.R.A. has left under Seumas' bed to her own room, thinking they will be less likely to be looked for there, and, when they are found and the young girl is haled to the lorry by her brutal captors, the two room-fellows, whose brave pretences have given place to abject terror, let her go to her death, the poet cursing his cowardice, the huckster bawling that it was no affair of his annyway.

Irish dramatists of the candid school are not kind to their countrymen. Mr. O'Casey has indeed an almost in human detachment. The black-and-tanner who makes the search of Seumas's room is a bully and a ruffian, but he is a less contemptible figure than Seumas or Donal or Tommy Owens, the little boasting slum-rat, or the drink-sodden Adolphus Grigson, with his Bible and his law-abiding pose.

This play is a reminder of unhappy things that both Irishmen and Englishmen of sensibility would be glad to forget. Perhaps, then, there is something to be said for the laughter which is the standard English way of relief from disquieting reflection. I hope that was partly the explanation of it.

Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who plays most of the two Acts in his untidy bed, has a wonderful Sinclair part. A gross, lazy, peppery humbug of a man is Seumas Shields. Mr. Harry Hutchinson's Donal was skilfully and carefully played—a little too quietly for comfortable hearing. Mr. Sydney Morgan's Adolphus couldn't have been bettered, and Mr. Brian O'Dare's Tommy Owens was horribly effective. Miss Maire O'Neill and Miss Sara Allgood gave us two competent short studies of Irish women, and Miss Eileen Carey's charming little portrait of Minnie owed more perhaps to her natural gifts than to her technical accomplishment. I say “perhaps,” because it isn't easy to be sure that her reticent method wasn't a deliberate choice and the best choice for the part. This company of players deserves the benefit of all doubts.

J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, with Miss Sara Allgood in her old part of the bereaved Maurya, did not move us as it was wont to do. Is this really no more than a too self-conscious literary drama which fails to wear?

Three ladies of the audience performed deeds of grace which deserve a chronicler. One (poordarling!) afflicted with a cough twice fled from the theatre to avoid spoiling her neighbours' pleasure; two others, coming late, stood through the first play. A tablet should be put up to them at the Court in perpetuam rei memoriam.