The Essential Continuity of Sean O'Casey

The Essential Continuity of Sean O'Casey CHRISTOPHER INNES There is a general assumption behind almost all critical approaches to Sean O'Casey's work, which deserves examination, if only because it is so common . Despite Denis Johnston's assertion in 1926, the year of The Plough and the Stars, that O'Casey's first three plays are increasingly poetic in dialogue and.expressionistic in form, the Dublin trilogy is almost invariably held up as an example of naturalism. Equally, all his theatrical output from the 1934 production of Within the Gates, whether labelled expressionist or fantasy , is seen as the stylistic antithesis of the early plays. Biographic reference is used to support this: O'Casey's move from Ireland to England after the Plough riots is taken as the sign of a radical departure in subjeci matter. To some critics his 1928 break with the Abbey theatre gave him the liberty to explore new dramatic forms. To others it shows limitations that come from writing without the practical discipline of stage production, resulting in flawed language and abstract characterization. In both cases, The Silver Tassie, as the immediate cause of O'Casey's break with the Abbey, is considered an amalgam of opposing styles, signalling the transition from one to another. One recent critic at least has tried to redress the balance by emphasizing the realistic basis of the symbolism in his two most expres.sionistic works. But this argument for the unity of O'Casey's vision still accepts the unquestioned naturalism of his Dublin plays, and its premise is that throughout his career O'Casey employed a " basically realistic technique. " I By contrast, the continuity of O'Casey's work should be seen as far more radical, since his early trilogy can be shown to be no less non-naturalistic beneath its apparent surface than his later recognizably symbolic plays. Even the shift in characterization, from seemingly individualized and rounded figures towards the typical and two-dimensional, is demonstrably part of a consistent development, instead of being evidence of a break between two different styles. Indeed, the critical views that posit such division in O'Casey's career lead to inherently contradictory conclusions. 420 CHRISTOPHER INNES That O'Casey's post-war plays have had remarkably few performances is conventionally seen as being directly due to their poetic expressionism and overt political bias (the latter indeed being the reason for their adoption by the Berliner Ensemble). Conversely, the popularity of the early plays becomes evidence for the absence of specifically these qualities, leading to the type of judgement put most directly by Joseph Wood Krutch: "[O'Casey] offers no solution; he proposes no remedy; he suggests no' hope. " " His plays lack form, lack movement, and in the final analysis lack any informing purpose." More recently and more subtly this analysis has been used to align O'Casey with the existentialist vision of "life as farce with which tragic experience must come to tenns" in depicting 'I a world whose structures will never live up to their promise. '" Yet this line is highly problematic in the light of O'Casey's firmly held socialist principles, practically expressed in his association with the labour leader, Jim Larkin, and his involvement in founding the Irish Citizens' Army. Acknowledging that these form the background for the Dublin plays logically leads to the argument that they represent a repudiation of Marxism - a conclusion which can only be sustained by assuming there is no continuity with later works such as The Star Turns Red (1940) and Red Roses for Me (1943). Another case in point is the influence of Bernard Shaw. Shaw, of course, intervened in defence of The Silver Tassie, and critics have generally followed Denis Johnston (who deplored the "damage done by the honeyed poison of G.B.S. ") in seeing his influence as mainly limited to O'Casey's subsequent didactic work. Certainly the model of Shaw is most noticeable in Purple Dust (1940, first produced 1945), where the situation of a rich Englishman's attempt to impose his ethos on an Irish village, the major characters and the satiric contrast between neo-colonialism and the supposedly backward natives directly...