O'Casey's Dramatic Apprenticeship

Q'CASEY'S DRAMATIC APPRENTICESHIP BEFORE W. B. YEATS, Lady Gregory, and Lennox Robinson rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928 and precipitated Sean O'Casey's break with the Abbey Theatre, the Theatre had produced five of his plays. Three of them-The Shadow of a Gunman, luno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars-established O'Casey's international reputation as a major dramatist. The two other plays-''Kathleen Listens In" and "Nannie's Night Out"-exist in manuscript and will presently be published .! Both plays are one-acts: the former is a satiric fantasy which foreshadows the method of O'Casey's recent work, and the latter is a tragicomedy similar in manner to the three famous early plays. The Shadow of a Gunman, O'Casey's first play accepted by the Abbey, was produced in April, 1923, when O'Casey was forty-three years old, and had a resounding success. It does not detract from the accomplishment of the Gunman to note that Seaghan 0 Cathasaigh, the laborer, had done some arduous apprentice playwriting before Sean O'Casey, the master dramatist, erupted onto the Abbey stage and into the modem repertoire. He had written four or possibly five oneact plays that were unproduced. The names of these earlier plays were "The Robe of Rosheen," "The Frost in the Flower," "Nipped in the Bud," "The Harvest Festival," and ''The Crimson in the Tri-Colour." None of them has as yet come to light, and to know anything of them we must depend mainly upon what O'Casey has told us. Of ''The Robe of Rosheen," O'Casey wrote in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well: Well, he had done his best to get a word in edgeways. He had written a one-act play, satirising the contesting parties and putting official Labour against the wall for its stupid and selfish pursuit of jobs, instead of flinging themselves between the opposing guns, calling out the question of which of you will fire firstl Sean could never hear a word about his little play, though he had sent it to The Plain People, and though he asked many who were connected with the distribution of the journal. It was ten years after, when he was living in London, that a priest from Kerry visited him, and reminded him of his play, The Robe of Rosheen, which had appeared so long ago in the Republican paper, though ne'er another soul, apparently, had ever noticed it.2 1. "Kathleen Listens In" will be included in a volume of essays, Under a Coloured Cap, to be published by St. Martin's Press, and both plays will be included in Feathers from the Green Crow, a collection of early work, edited by Robert Hogan and to be published by the University of Missouri Press. 2. Inishfallen, Fare Thee WeU (New York, 1956), p. 151. 243 244 MODERN DRAMA December In The Green Crow O'Casey speaks of "Raisin's Robe. . printed in The Plain People" and says that the play, the first to appear in print, "was in his later manner."3 I have been unable to locate a complete file of The Plain People, and it is even possible that the play appeared in some other journal, for I have occasionally found the playwright 's memory a trifle faulty about minor matters which occurred so long ago.4 The only thing certain is that at sometime, somewhere, the play appeared in print.5 O'Casey next wrote "The Frost in the Flower." As the paragraph describing the play in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well also contains the sentence, "Instead of trying to form Ireland's life, he would shape his own,"6 the play probably was written after O'Casey's resignation as secretary of the Irish Citizen Army in 1914. The play was a satire on Frank Cahill, the founder of the St. Lawrence O'Toole Gaelic Club and an early friend of O'Casey. With Cahill, O'Casey had founded the club's Pipers' Band. The play was refused by the group, and about 1919 O'Casey sent it off to the Abbey. In Sean O'Casey, the Man and his...