Читать книгу The Past - Neil Jordan - Страница 14

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SHE IS SEEN in frieze, as it were, on an impromptu stage in what looks like a drawing-room with elegant French windows. She is holding a spear and she has her head thrown back, her marvellous hair bound by what seems to be a leather cord. There are two youths on either side of her, dressed in pleated skirts which could be Grecian but for the elaborate Celtic signs emblazoned on them. And all three are staring towards what must be the cowled head of a photographer.

SHE IS IN a peasant shawl, with a flat behind her depicting the gable end of a thatched cottage. The drawing-room is larger and more sumptuous and the flats are bounded by a heavy brocade curtain, covering, I have no doubt, a set of even more splendid French windows. Her head is raised and her eyes are blazing with a kind of posed defiance. To her left is a figure with a grotesque false paunch and a large top hat bearing the legend ‘John Bull’. This figure is glowering, over her shoulders, towards an equally caricaturish figure on her right who can be taken, from his goatee beard and his spiked Prussian helmet, to represent the Kaiser Wilhelm. And between them Una’s fleshy arm is raised to point to a banner stiffly fluttering from the cottage’s thatched gable. And the banner reads: ENGLAND’S DIFFICULTY?

AND IN THE last photo the drawing-room has given way to the interior of a theatre and the flats and the setting are more elaborate, though the scene they depict is even more decrepit. The scene is a room in a Dublin tenement in which a young man is sitting by a typewriter, his mouth open wide, obviously declaiming something to an unseen audience, his hand ruffling his unruly hair. I have no doubt that the play is O’Casey’s first, The Shadow of a Gunman, and that the stage is the early Abbey; that the youth is Domnall Davoren and that the line he is declaiming is Shelley’s ‘Ah me alas, pain, pain, ever, for ever’, with which O’Casey for some reason peppered the dialogue. Behind him, peeping over his shoulder at his typewritten sheet, holding a bowl of sugar, is Una. And I have no doubt that she is meant to represent the most ideal and fragile of all of O’Casey’s heroines, Minnie Powell; and that her Minnie Powell was on the plump side and definitely too old. She was thirty-three by then, and looked it.