O’Casey’s Play Not a Success

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 868, 11 January 1930, Page 22

O’Casey’s Play Not a Success

MR. SHAW TO MR. COCHRAN LETTER OF CONGRATULATION j Sean O'Casey's latest play. "The j Silver Tassie.” has not been a commercial success in London. It was produced on a magnificent ! scale by Charles B. Cochran, who lias i now decided to send the whole produc- | tion and the seenery to New York. ; At the end of the London season Mr. Cochran received the follow- j, 3 iug letter from T* George Bernard Shaw: "My dear A ’ Cochran: 1 really W?*' jy’ i must congratulate you on ’The Tassie’ before it passes into the c B Cochrjin classical repertory It is a magnificent play: and it v as • magnificent gesture of youis to pro- " The high brows should have pioduced it: you, the unpretentious showman. did, as you have done so many other noble and rash things on your I Sundays. This, I think, will rank as the best of them. I hope you have not lost too much by it, especially as l am quite sure you have done your best i j;i that direction by doing the thing i as extravagantly as possible. “That is the worst of operating on vour colossal scale; you haven t time to economise; and you lose the habit, of thinking it worth while. No matter. a famous achievement. "There is a new drama rising from unplumbed depths to sweep the nice little bourgeois efforts of myself and my contemporaries into the dustbin; and your name will live as that of the ; man who didn’t run away. “If only someone would built you , huge Woolworth Theatre (all seats sd) to start with O'Casey and O'Neill, and no plays by men who had ever seen a £5 note before they were 30, or been inside a school after they were 13. you would be buried in Westminster Abbey, fcavol”