Word: macken
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Home Is the Hero (by Walter Macken) treats of an Irish household, and of the father's return to it after five years in prison for killing a man in a brawl. Paddo O'Reilly returns home an even worse bully than he went away: he has a new sense of guilt that makes him flagellate others instead of himself, and an old will to dominate that soon has him trying to upset everyone's plans and destroy everyone's happiness. Only at the end does Paddo-or rather, Playwright Macken-relent: in a most ignominious...
RAIN ON THE WIND (312 pp.]-Walter Macken-Macmillan...
...rich Celtic twilight of William Butler Yeats and J. M. Synge has long since faded, but their disciples are still lighting little peat fires on the general bog of contemporary Irish literature. The latest of these, a novel by Walter Macken called Rain on the Wind, never quite bursts into flame; the book carries so much sentimental moisture that it douses its own glim...
...girl's name (Maeve) and the way he finds her at last (kneeling by the sea in a storm) are good cues to the book's worst fault: the bleary Irish rapture of it all. As an actor, Walter Macken has demonstrated to U.S. playgoers in The King of Friday's Men (TIME, March 5) that he can trip the light fantastic tongue of Ireland as well as any man. Yet when he comes to write, the tongue seems to wag the man. Except for a few set pieces, e.g., a vivid description of a storm...
...swashbuckling stage piece about the Ireland that ran more to liquor than to leprechauns, The King of Friday's Men has some of the old Irish gift of words, while Dowd has some of the mighty human dimensions of folklore. And Actor Macken, who first played the part at the Abbey, brings real vigor to it, and the smack and caress of Irish speech. But the play's snatches of racy prose do not offset its stretches of lumpish playwriting. Too often both untidy and oldfashioned, it closed after four performances...