Sean O'Casey and the Lockout of 1913: Materia Poetica of the Two Red Plays

SEAN O'CASEY AND THE LOCKOUT OF 1913: MATERIA POETICA OF THE TWO RED PLAYS PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT event in Ireland in the twentieth century was the Easter Rebellion of 1916, that most successful failure in the history of warfare, whose gunfire has been echoed and amplified by such Irishmen as William Butler Yeats, Lennox Robinson, James Stephens, and George Bernard Shaw. That famous April 24 also had its influence on the observing genius of Sean O'Casey and is the origin of his The Plough and the Stars and most of his powerful third volume of autobiography, Drums under the Windows. But as important as this 1916 defeat was to O'Casey, there was an earlier event, a more complete fiasco, that was to him much more significant, the Great Lockout of 1913. This little known and less publicized event was not only responsible for two of his most expressionistic dramas, The Star Turns Red and Red Roses for Me, but is also the origin of the Communistic views which he has held tenaciously for almost five decades and which have given him the scarlet tint that the dramatic world sees in his plays since the Abbey years. . When O'Casey left the Abbey and Ireland in 1926, he left the typical Irish characters, themes, and settings which he had used to weld drama from his own experiences, and turned instead toward characters, scenes, and themes that he considered more generally universal. He left Irish reality in the Dublin slums to search for the s),mbols and impressions of universality in London; yet twice more, in 1940 and again in 1942, he mentally returned to the Ireland of his youth, to those basically Irish characters and scenes, and molded his view of the 1913 Dublin strike into drama. In the interval before he re-examined his early life to find the ore for drama's gold, however , his plays had changed their form. They, with O'Casey, had left the way of realism to walk the paths of expressionistic art. O'Casey came to believe that dramatists "must change, must experiment, must develop their power, or try to, if the drama is to live,"l and thus the Great Lockout of 1913 appears as the expressionistic drama 1 Sean o'Casey, The GTeen CTOW (New York, 1956), p. 182. 53 54 MODERN DRAMA May of his two controversial red plays. Although he lists the time of The Star Turns Red as "tomorrow, or the next day" and that of Red Roses for Me as a vague "little while ago," the action of both plays and dedication of the former to "the men and women who fought through the Great Dublin Lockout in nineteen hundred and thirteen " make clear that the base for each is the 1913 strike. Both plays use the strike for general background and motivation of the action, much as the three great Abbey plays had used the Anglo-Irish conflict . Both deal with the divided loyalty of a young idealist who must choose between personal attachments and his own safety or loyalty to his fellow workers; both end in the death of that idealist. Yet, the death of the protagonist notwithstanding, O'Casey has neither intended nor fashioned tragedies of the plays, but has concluded each on a note of glaring optimism. The hope is entwined with his Communism and with the most idealistic principles behind the 1913 strike, which he saw as the first wedge that might be used to topple the walls of capitalism and free the workers of Ireland and hence the world. Russia had to wait four years for her 1917 revolt, for Ireland had been the first to hear the voice of a new leader who hurried through Dublin's fetid back alleys shouting for the workers to come into the sun and fight. This new voice in the slum wilderness of filth was the labor leader Jim Larkin, who forced aside the somber-coated managers and the drab-shirted workers to make a path for his followers in their scarlet mufflers. He had come to Dublin from Belfast, where he had begun his flamboyant career in 1907 as a...