Theatre review: The Shadow of a Gunman

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

First produced in 1923, Seán O’Casey’s tragicomedy rails against the romanticisation of violence, excoriates the artistic desire to remain aloof from politics, and scorns the all-too-habitual hypocrisy and cowardice of people in general.

It is therefore a play positively seething with anger and, in this new production, director Wayne Jordan does a fine job of summoning all that anger while teasing out O’Casey’s absurd vaudeville comedy, too.

Notably, Jordan brings a lot of stylised elements to bear on the play, something that O’Casey might well have enjoyed. The set eschews the familiar ‘bleak tenement’ shtick for something more playful and yet no less austere, while the costumes reference many different historical periods, including our own.

The production does take a while to settle, with the opening scene between the poet Donal Davoren (Mark O’Halloran) and his roommate, the peddler Seamus Shields (David Ganly) a particularly edgy affair. Each actor seems to draw on very different performance traditions — Ganly on a classic comic realism, O’Halloran on a subtle expressionism.

As a result, there’s a lot of mannerism and a lot of movement and it makes for a weird, somewhat jittery start. But all of the production’s eccentric elements come to congeal wonderfully as the play progresses and it arrives at a thrilling crescendo.

While the show has a contemporary vibe, the historical urgencies of the War of Independence are rendered very viscerally. Moreover, Jordan infuses O’Casey’s tragic farce with an atmosphere that is at times extraordinarily dark.

O’Halloran’s poet — who the other tenement dwellers mistake for a fugitive IRA gunman — becomes a very shady customer indeed, while the superb light-hearted comedy of Catherine Walsh and Malcolm Adams is counterbalanced by the distressing black comedy of the Grigsons.

Until Aug 12