Seán O'Casey: Writer at Work. A Biography (review)

Scholars who work on Seán O'Casey have waited a long time for a good biography. Garry O'Connor attempted one in 1988; but Seán O'Casey: A Life was neither comprehensive nor reliable enough to provide a secure foundation for scholarship. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the task. During his long life, O'Casey generated mountains of correspondence and commentary in addition to his plays, prose, and poetry. He also transformed his life story into a six-volume autobiography that has long fascinated readers precisely because it makes no clear distinction between fantasy and actuality. But Christopher Murray's Seán O'Casey: Writer at Work has finally wrestled O'Casey's dauntingly voluminous archive and body of work into a single womb-to-tomb master narrative. This monumental tome is unquestionably the definitive biography of Seán O'Casey, and it will be cited copiously and gratefully even by those who take issue with its arguments.

It is Murray's treatment of O'Casey's life after his move to England that makes this biography especially valuable. As far as current scholarship, contemporary revivals, and undergraduate classrooms are concerned, O'Casey's life might as well have ended in 1928, when the Abbey Theatre's directors rejected The Silver Tassie. However, O'Casey wrote most of his plays after he left Ireland, and the realism of Juno and the Paycock was a stage through which O'Casey passed before embarking on a decades-long quest for a new dramatic form. Murray meticulously reconstructs the circumstances under which O'Casey wrote his later plays and the conditions that determined their production histories. Spanning thirty-five years and involving directors, producers, actors, and audiences all over the English-speaking world, this part of his life story is a goldmine for anyone interested in twentieth-century theatre. Murray may not succeed in renewing interest in the plays, but he does establish that "What happened to Seán O'Casey?" is not a rhetorical question. Indeed, since the most commonly accepted answer is that O'Casey wrote well only when inspired by his experience of the Dublin slums and/or the real-life drama of Ireland's struggle for independence, the failures of O'Casey's later plays open up important questions about the relationship between Irishness and authenticity, about the expectations that English and American audiences bring to any work by an "Irish writer," and about why some formal experiments succeed while others fail.

Murray approaches his subject with a mixture of awe and embarrassment that will be familiar to students of O'Casey criticism. Unwilling to deny O'Casey's "genius," Murray nevertheless declines to defend all of O'Casey's later plays as unsung masterpieces. Instead, Murray lets the life suggest reasons that O'Casey never had the brilliant career that he might have had. Censorship, fear of controversy and innovation on the part of commercial producers, misconceived and/or poorly executed premiere productions, O'Casey's increasing isolation from live theatre, and the declining power of the left, especially in the United States, all took their toll. (O'Casey's unwavering loyalty to Stalin and the Soviet Union even after the invasion of Hungary in 1956 seldom helped his reception.) But Murray also shows O'Casey as one of his own worst enemies, concluding that O'Casey's biggest problem may have been his assertion of total control over his plays. O'Casey's fanatical insistence on the autonomy of the playwright and the sanctity of the text made it difficult for him to collaborate with the innovative directors, producers, and performers who might have been able to bring his creations to life. Indeed, Murray suggests that the only way to keep these plays alive in the twenty-first century is by adapting them – saving O'Casey's plays, as it were, over his dead body.

If Murray has doubts about the...