In THE CRAZY WALL John B. Keane has lost none of his realistic force in creating the powerful symbol of the wall that Michael Barnett erects ostensibly to ward off tramps and other interlopers but in fact for deeper, intensely personal reasons known only to himself. Is this wall intended to serve as a moat, to isolate Michael from the harsh realities of the outside world? Or does it symbolise, for Michael and the members of his family, the lack of communication between them that sometimes makes a husband and wife, brothers and sisters seem like strangers under the same roof?
John B. Keane has attained a new depth of insight and sympathy in this play. In Michael Barnett, the National Teacher, a man who drinks to dull his sense of sorrow of life, who has many faults and yet possesses a certain nobility that transcends them all, he has created one of his most memorable characters. In the other people of the play he presents a gallery that will live in the mind: Mary Barnett, Michael's wife, grief-stricken that her younger sons Tom and Paddy are different from other boys in the country; Michael's friends, the traditionalist and nationalist Sean and the good humoured Jack; Michael's other son Lelum who wants to be an actor against his father's wishes; the tragic wanderer, Moses McCoy, who has lost his wife and sons. Above all, John B. Keane has brilliantly evoked the atmosphere of the Emergency, with the cold gloating voice of Lord Haw Haw as a chorus of those strange twilight years when Ireland stood isolated on the edge of a warring Europe,
Genre: General Fiction
John B. Keane has attained a new depth of insight and sympathy in this play. In Michael Barnett, the National Teacher, a man who drinks to dull his sense of sorrow of life, who has many faults and yet possesses a certain nobility that transcends them all, he has created one of his most memorable characters. In the other people of the play he presents a gallery that will live in the mind: Mary Barnett, Michael's wife, grief-stricken that her younger sons Tom and Paddy are different from other boys in the country; Michael's friends, the traditionalist and nationalist Sean and the good humoured Jack; Michael's other son Lelum who wants to be an actor against his father's wishes; the tragic wanderer, Moses McCoy, who has lost his wife and sons. Above all, John B. Keane has brilliantly evoked the atmosphere of the Emergency, with the cold gloating voice of Lord Haw Haw as a chorus of those strange twilight years when Ireland stood isolated on the edge of a warring Europe,
Genre: General Fiction
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