In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

POLITICAL ALLEGORY IN O'CASEY'S PURPLE DUST IT IS NO LIBEL TO SAY THAT Sean Q'Casey was a Marxist; he proudly proclaimed his Communism and never hesitated to express his admirationfor Stalin and the USSR. However, Q'Casey was never caught up in "socialist realism," the literary net that has entrapped so many leftist writers. He established his reputation with the realistic Abbey Theater plays, but as he became more confirmed in his Marxism he abandoned realism and began to experiment with such "revisionist" dramatic forms as expressionism and symbolism. Throughout his lifetime Q'Casey gave evidence again and again that he was his own man, but his willingness to test new dramatic forms should not blind us to the fact that he was a socialist writer who repeatedly placed his art at the service of revolutionary change. An overtly tendentious play such as The Star Turns Red saw him failing as both artist and propagandist, but he was for the most part saved from this creative pitfall by an inner magnet that pulled him back to his true north-to comedy. Comedy was his solution to the Marxist playwright's dilemma of how to write plays that are easily understood and appreciated by a popular audience but are at the same time aesthetically significant. O'Casey's strength was his comedy, for his political beliefs were so deeply felt that without laughter his drama had a tendency to turn to political preachment. When he allowed his comic gift full freedom, he was able to exercise the comedian's classic prerogative, to provide profit and delight. Purple Dust has long been recognized as one of O'Casey's funniest plays. It is a rollicking farce, seemingly intent only on entertaining, but beneath the ripples of surface laughter runs a powerful current of revolutionary prophecy: a political allegory of the destruction of capitalism and the victory of militant socialism. So finely balanced are the play's internal values that it is possible to see it as either a masterfully executed saturnalian comedy or as a grim, anti-British tract. It is, of course, both. The play is indebted to Shaw's John Bull's Other Island for its plot. Shaw's play pits a handful of wily Irishmen against a single British fool, Broadbent; Q'Casey places two Englishmen in the hands of a crafty group of Irish peasants. Shaw's Englishman triumphs, 47 48 MODERN DRAMA May ironically, because of his foolishness; O'Casey's British fools fail miserably.1 In Purple Dust, two wealthy Englishmen, Stoke and Poges, acquire a dilapidated Tudor mansion in a small town in the west of Ireland and arrive with their Irish mistresses and servants to rebuild the house and recapture the elegance and splendor of the past. From the start it is obvious that both the Irish workmen and the would-be country squires hold each other in mutual contempt. The Englishmen patronize the Irish as simple-minded rustics, and the Irish laugh at the gullibility and stupidity of the Englishmen. Stoke and Poges are comic victims in the archetypal vein-everything they touch turns to disaster. In contrast to Shaw's single farcical scene in John BuZZ's Other Island where a pig is caught in the front seat of a speeding automobile, O'Casey multiplies the comic action: Stoke is thrown from a frisky Irish horse, an Irish workman pokes hole after hole in the ceiling in an effort to find where a light fixture goes, a cow wanders into the house, a huge lawn roller runs wild through the house and knocks down a wall, workmen tear down part of a doorway in an effort to force an antique bureau through it, and in the final scene the old house is inundated by a flood. The two Irish heroes are a pair of Christy Mahons, masters of the rhetoric of courtship. They quite easily sweep away the two Irish girls, Avril and Souhaun, from under the noses of the Englishmen. The denouement follows the comic convention: O'Dempsey rides off into the storm on horseback with Souhaun, and O'Killigain rows off in a small boat with Avril...

pdf

Share