Sean O'Casey by James Simmons, and: My Very Dear Sean: George Jean Nathan to Sean O'Casey, Letters and Articles ed. by Robert G. Lowery and Patricia Angelin (review)

Book Reviews JAMES SIMMONS. Sean O'Casey. New York: Grove Press 1983. Pp. 187. illustrated. $12.50. ROBERT G. LOWERY and PATRICIA ANGELIN, eds. My Very Dear Sean: George Jean NaIhan to Sean O'Casey, Letters and Articles. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press 1985. pp. 187. $24.50. Sean O'Casey's career as a dramatist was as unlikely as it was undervalued. At the start he was fortunate to have the help and encouragement of Lady Gregory. He benefited from having his plays acted by a strong Abbey company not yet in its decline. The Abbey was of course fortunate to find him. As Yeats doubtless realized when he chastized the Abbey audience in O'Casey's defence, the new dramatistwould hold the stage for many years to come. Yet O'Casey's experiments in The Silver Tassie were not entirely convincing. for his sentimentality breaks out like a rash and his Janguage sometimes fails. To the irritation of those who admire the middJe and late O'Casey (and there is much to admire) none of the plays written after The Tassie has had as much success with English-speaking audiences as has Juno and the Paycock. After 1945 the resurgence of English drama soon included Beckett and critics quickly took him to be one of its masters, but did not pay much attention to O'Casey. Beckett's language never fails in the theatre and his idiom is international rather than obviously Irish. The sense that Irish plays set in Ireland need an Irish cast rather than an English stage-Irish one has probably worked against the wider perfonnance ofO'Casey's plays in England, even though there are actors and directors there unperturbed by his politics. In America there seems little doubt that his Communism has held him back. O'Casey's later work has, by and large though, found enthusiastic recognition in the East Gennan theatre. Ronald Ayling's and Michael Durkan's indispensable Bibliography indicates his work's popularity with the Soviet State Publishing House. Yet O'Casey's plays are too significant to be judged on political grounds. They deserve a rigorous dramatic criticism concerned to discuss their aesthetic effect, II6 Book Reviews their status as art. James Simmons's Sean O'Casey does just that, vividly and vigorously. Eight brief chapters begin with a context-setting "Life, Times and Influences (1880- 1964)," necessarily concise in such a series as The Modem Dramatists from Grove Press. But Simmons manages the difficult art of being perceptive, fresh, and. I think, fair in a little space. The result is a very readable book. He stresses the right things, such as that O'Casey "found a solution to the apparent antagonism between popular and serious theatre" (p. 2), and that it is his particular "mixture of farce and violence that seems so original" (p. 14). Sinunons makes the most ofjuxtapositions such as an account of Yeats's famous defence ofO'Casey followed by the information that "O'Casey went home to look up 'apotheosis'" (p. 18). There is a succinct and useful discussion of Boucicault's influence, with a welcome caveat about the over~emphasis ofExpressionism in a writer who never lost sight of the "the drama of individual human beings" (p. 29). The vast autobiographies are given a little space in the first chapter and the whole of the seventh. Simmons manages to convey a fair sense of their essential interest and shortcomings by means of well·chosen quotation and astute analysis: he is always alert to the false literariness which at times plagued O'Casey. It is refreshing to read criticism that is mature enough to see the warts, rather than attempting to justify as unfailingly "right" everything O'Casey published. A chapter each for The Shadow ofa Gunmafl, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, and the later plays as a group, reveals Simmons's emphasis; pace apologists for the later work, the emphasis seems to be copfmned by the repertoire and its audiences. Within his limitations of space Simmons very neatly considers the texts and some of their major productions: a sense ofdrama as pert'ormance infonns his...