Sean O'Casey Attacks Modern Playwrights for Venality and Spinelessness of Today's Writing

Sean O'Casey, noted Irish dramatist, delivered the first of the Morris Gray lectures to a large audience in the Fogg Lecture Room yesterday afternoon. Taking as his theme for exposition "The Old Drama and the New," O'Casey quickly won the assemblage with his rich Irish brogue, and proceeded to give a pleasing and exceedingly informal dissertation upon the relative merits of modern and Elizabethan dramatic technique. The modernists, needless to say, emerged a very poor second.

In his introductory remarks, the diminutive Irishman occupied himself with a flagellation of one William Archer, an eminent English dramatic critic who was so imprudent as to publish a book. "The Old Drama and the New," ridiculing the Elizabethan dramatists. This work holds that many of the seventeenth century plays tend toward a childish over emphasis of the horror element, and contrasts the unpretentious realism of the modern stage. In spirited refutation, O'Casey tied Webster's "Ducieas of Malfi," and pointed out that the swords and bloody charnel-houses of Webster are no more to be taken seriously than the telephones and camisoled ladies seen on the boards today. Archer has based his arguments merely on the mechanics of the dramatist. The case against him was complete when O'Casey read, with devasting humor, a bit of insipid dialogue from a current London social comedy.

After disparaging modern "realism," the be spectacled, sharp featured dramatist expressed the need for a more poetic and elevated style of dialogue. He made several biting remarks on the critics' taste for "comfortable" plays, but graciously asserting that the stagnation of the contemporary stage is due, not to the stupidity of the audiences, but to the venality and spinelessness of the modern playwright. Questions at the close of the lecture were answered with flashing wit. Asked whether there was not a dearth of Irish plays, O'Casey pallied gracefully by remarking that dramatisis are turning out enough plays but they're all bad ones.