The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O'Casey

First published: 1925

First produced: 1923, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Type of plot: Tragicomedy; history

Time of work: 1920

Locale: Dublin

Principal Characters:

• Donal Davoren, a poet and false gunman
• Minnie Powell, a romantic rebel who protects Donal
• Seumas Shields, a peddler and former rebel

The Play

The Shadow of a Gunman takes place amid the disruptions of the Troubles caused by the Irish Rebellion of 1916 and the subsequent war between the Irish and British in the country. Its focus is not the battlefield, however, but the tenement, and the characters are not conventionally heroic but very human and flawed. The most important character is Donal Davoren, a poet who has no interest in the social or political life of his country. He exists, instead, in a world of words and dreams, as he struggles to create beauty in a Dublin tenement. He shares an apartment with Seumas Shields, a former Republican who still has a few friends in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and now makes a precarious living selling suspenders and buttons. He is no poet, although he knows a substantial amount of poetry; he believes, instead, in the Roman Catholic Church as a means of finding security and peace in a troubled time. He is also superstitious and constantly reading meaning into signs.

The last major character, Minnie Powell, is perhaps less well developed than the others. She is an enthusiastic Republican and a romantic. She seems to have an independence that the others lack, but her romantic dreams are fed by the same patriotic illusions that animate most of the minor characters in the play. She is attracted to Davoren because she thinks that he is a gunman on the run. When she reveals this perception to Davoren, he allows her to continue thinking of him in this heroic manner because it enables him to have a relationship with an attractive young woman, but this irresponsible furthering of an illusion ends up producing the tragedy at the end of the play.

The middle section of the play is taken up with comic demands by Davoren’s neighbors and the news of the death of Seumas’s friend Maguire in an IRA action. To the neighbors, the war is nothing more than a patriotic game they can play; they do not see it as a part of their real daily lives. As Davoren says, “The Irish people are very fond of turning a serious thing into a joke.” They want Davoren to get the help of the IRA against the landlord or to certify their own expressions of patriotism. The death of Maguire, a compatriot of Seumas, intrudes upon this farcical behavior, and it leads Davoren and Seumas to discuss more seriously the political situation in the Ireland of 1920. Seumas describes the country as “mad,” since the rebels have sworn allegiance to a religion of the gun. The result, however, is ironic: “It’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen.” The rhetoric of revolution and heroism produces sorrow and suffering for the people for whom the rebels are fighting.

The climax of the play comes out of a comic situation. Mrs. Grigson is worried that her husband will be shot while he is drinking after curfew, so she seeks the help of the gunman, Davoren. She is more worried about her husband’s insurance than about his survival, but she does reveal that Tommy Owens has been bragging about an IRA general in his building. This clowning is followed by the serious action of a British raid of the tenement and the discovery that the satchel left by Maguire contains bombs. Davoren and Seumas are befuddled and afraid until Minnie runs in and volunteers to take the bag to her room and hide it. Arrested by the British, she dies in the midst of explosions and shots. The two main characters react to this tragedy according to their nature: Seumas appeals to superstition, and Davoren sees it as further evidence of his suffering. However, his suffering is not transformed into awareness or action. He can only lapse into the romantic clichés of suffering in the poetry he is always quoting and trying to write. Most significant of all is the fact that he avoids any real responsibility for the tragedy. He and Seumas both escape the demands of history and the commitments they have to others and hide from reality.

Dramatic Devices

One of Sean O’Casey’s most important devices is the special and noticeable styles he gives to the characters. For example, Seumas always repeats phrases, a speech pattern that indicates his obsessed and nervous character. Davoren’s language is full of high-flown romantic imagery and expressions: “Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!” This language makes it clear that he is distanced from the real world of the tenements. Seumas says that the job of a poet is “to put passion in the common people,” but Davoren replies that the poet “lives on the mountain-top.” The florid Republican style of Tommy Owens (“It’s ‘Up the Republic’ all the time—eh, Mr. Davoren?”) is also amusing and helps define his character by showing the distance between his rhetoric and his actions. In contrast, Minnie’s language is straightforward, without the verbal quirks that abound in the style of everyone else in the play.

Another device is the mixture of the comic and the tragic. The play would be a comic farce without the historical context and the sudden intrusion of death. The characters tend to be absurd and dominated by mannerisms; but one, Minnie, rises to the occasion and acts heroically in the changed circumstances. She may not be a tragic heroine, since she lacks full awareness of herself and her world, but by her actions she defines herself as a caring and serious human being. The others, especially Davoren and Seumas, show, in the end, that they are simply ridiculous posturers, incapable of change.

Critical Context

The Shadow of a Gunman was the first important play by Sean O’Casey. He was to continue that success and improve upon the elements of the early play in his two other Dublin plays, Juno and the Paycock (pr. 1924, pb. 1925) and The Plough and the Stars (pr., pb. 1926). In Juno and the Paycock, male irresponsibility is portrayed as more consciously malign and destructive than in The Shadow of a Gunman. The main character, Captain Boyle, has brought his family down to shame and destitution, but when he discovers that his daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, he rejects her insult to his pride and honor. Mrs. Boyle tells her daughter that the child will be better off, since it will have two mothers in place of the absent father.

In his greatest play, The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey intensified the historical force, depicting the day-to-day social problems that end in the death of children by consumption. In the destruction of the 1916 Uprising, the common people of the tenement help one another, while the heroes of the IRA are selfish and destructive. All the elements of the later plays can be found in The Shadow of a Gunman, but O’Casey was able to strengthen and intensify them and their dramatic effect. O’Casey’s later plays became more expressionistic, beginning with his World War I play The Silver Tassie (pb. 1928, pr. 1929), as his settings moved out of Dublin tenements into larger worlds. These later plays were not, however, as successful. Once he moved out of the narrow, intimate world he knew so well, he lost the language and characters that made the early plays so important to their Irish audiences.

The Shadow of a Gunman was a radical departure for the Abbey Theatre. It had achieved fame by presenting the plays of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory, but these plays celebrated a rural or heroic vision of Ireland. The playwrights’ aim was to create myths to justify the claim of Ireland’s spiritual and cultural importance. O’Casey brought the slums of Dublin into the Abbey Theatre and thus changed it forever. He not only brought a new language and subject but also showed the Irish how they were actually living at the time and how they might change things. When audiences rejected The Silver Tassie, however, he left the Abbey and Ireland; both playwright and theater were to suffer from this break. The Abbey never found another playwright of O’Casey’s force and popularity, and O’Casey lost his roots in the Irish tenements.

Sources for Further Study

Brustein, Robert. Review in The New Republic 206 (January 27, 1992): 28-30.

Donoghue, Denis. We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Hogan, Robert. “Since O’Casey” and Other Essays on Irish Drama. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983.

Hunt, Hugh. Sean O’Casey. 2d ed. Minneapolis: Irish Books Media, 1998.

Krause, David. Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work. New York: Macmillan, 1960.

Malone, Maureen. The Plays of Sean O’Casey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

O’Riordan, John. A Guide to O’Casey’s Plays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Schrank, Bernice W. Sean O’Casey: A Research and Production Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.