Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective by Carol Kleiman (review)

Book Reviews CAROL KLEIMAN. Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982. Pp. xiv, I48, illustrated. $20 (CAN). The comment by Ronald Ayling that, "It is high time for critics to get away from the present overemphasis on Q'Casey's characterization and to pay attention, as Carol Kleiman does with intelligence and sensitivity, to dramatic structure and theatrical presentation," deserves to t>e seconded and endorsed. Included in an introductory note to Sean O'Casey's Bridge afVision , rather than as a blurb on a dust jacket (the University ofToranto Press has done away with them), the statement serves as a caveat and a battle cry. Kleiman methodical1y unearths an 0 'Casey devoted to the careful structuring of his complex dramas, as well as an O'Casey in constant interaction with the lessons to be learned from theatrical production. She isolates the two "visionary" plays, The Silver Tassie and Red Rosesfor Me, for meticulous analysis within the two inner essays of her book, and builds a bridge between Expressionism and the Theatre of the Absurd in the two outer essays, so that her text itself is scrupulously structured. In the encompassing span, Kleiman sets out "to check the growing tendency to exaggerate O'Casey's debt to continental Expressionism"; to verify Eric Bentley's contention that "the continental Expressionism ofStrindberg and Toller is quite different from the 'homemade' expressionism of Sean O'Casey"; and to demonstrate that The Tassie and Red Roses "juxtapose and blend realism and expressionism in a way that allows O'Casey to achieve a new kind of unity." At the other end of the span,· she maintains that even with the closing scene ofJuno, "the 'realistic' stage [was) stripped down to essentials in preparation for the curtain going up - a quarter century later - on the Theatre of the Absurd"; that "what links O'Casey ahead to Ionesco and the Absurdists, rather than back to Toller and the Expressionists, is the fact that O'Casey is not afraid to satirize verbal formulas - to disintegrate language along with the stage sets"; and that what "distinguishes O'Casey's vision from that of either the Expressionists or the Absurdists is the unerring ability to harmonize discords, to integrate successfully both thematically and in terms of stagecraft, all the wildly disintegrating elements of the world in which we live." O'Casey fought shy of the card~carrying Expressionists. except for his sympathies with Ernst Toller's politics, and attacked the Absurdists rn.aliciously - hardly his finest hour, although an octogenarian Cerberus can be forgiven his reluctance over new tricks. (Peeling apart the dissimilar Absurdists remains a sticky issue, and jf the label has to be retained, it should probably include not those who characterized the absurdities in human behavior or in the human condition, but those who specifically emphasized that life itself is patently absurd.) Any reopening of the "Tassie Controversy" remains high on most O'Caseyans' list of bone-grinding boredoms, but to Kleiman's credit, her"resolving" of the controversy has nothing to do with who baited, hated or excoriated whom. Instead, she makes manifest exactly what Yeats could not for the life of him see: the balances, the unities, the interwoven fabric of the play's conceptualization. Its phantasmagoric second act leads her directly to the third act of Red Roses, and although in her close tracking of all eight acts of the two plays she reexamines the well~known and well-worn, she also produces more than her share of new insights. Her reading of the palimpsest of The Silver Tassie, for example, involves "reading" Raymond Massey's directorial "reading" for the 1929 production; and she is impressive both when she traces "the search for the absent soldier Book Reviews 399 in the expressionist Act II" of the play with "similar discoveries ... in the expressionist Act Ill" of Red Roses/or Me, "where - though the plaster statue has disappeared - Our Lady of Eblana, herself, reappears in many forms," and when she analyzes O'Casey's language, "with its multiple dimensions and ironies ... far beyond realism to become expressionist in a special way, for it...