The Influence of Melodrama on the Early Plays of Sean O'Casey

THE INFLUENCE OF MELODRAMA ON THE EARLY PLAYS OF SEAN O'CASEY WHEN SEAN O'CASEY'S first volumes of autobiography began to appear in the late 1930's, many critics were surprised to see how much space O'Casey devoted to his early contact with nineteenth century melodrama , particularly the plays of Dion Boucicault. This was just about the last place critics of O'Casey's drama would have looked to discover possible influences on his early work. Not only was melodrama considered beneath critical contempt, but O'Casey had already been assigned another set of influences, influences far more acceptable to contemporary literary tastes. Most authorities took for granted that O'Casey was the next link in a long progression of Abbey writers including Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory. Walter Starkie, a former Abbey director, proudly announced: The Abbey Theatre may give itself credit for O'Casey's development as a dramatist. Always an assiduous spectator at the theatre ... with very little training in the drama he was able to produce a very fine play.1 Unfortunately, later documents established that O'Casey had very little acquaintance with the Abbey prior to the production of The Shadow of a Gunman in 1923. The only Abbey productions O'Casey attended were Gogarty's Blight in 1917 and a bill of one-acts in 1919. Even after he began submitting scripts to the Abbey in 1920 and 1921, his attendance did not become more frequent. When Mr. Perrin, the treasurer of the theater, offered him free tickets, O'Casey refused, arguing, "No one ought to come into the Abbey Theatre without paying for it."2 And O'Casey could not afford the price of admission. However, if O'Casey was not literally influenced by the Abbey tradition , there was another possible explanation for the nature of his early work. He was a "photographic naturalist." What other sources were open to a manual laborer with no formal education or scholarly background ? This led to the picture of O'Casey as the objective reporter, standing on the Dublin street corners, recording the speech and actions of the passersby for posterity. Of course, O'Casey did rely on personal observation for much of his subject material. Numerous characters 1. The Irish Theatre Lectures, edited by Lennox Robinson (London, 1939), p. 151. 2. Lady Gregory's Journals, 1916-1930, edited by Lennox Robinson (New York, 1947), p.73. 164 1962 MELODRAMA AND SEAN O'CASEY 165 and incidents in his Abbey plays are frankly autobiographical. However , this accounts only for the raw material of the Abbey plays and says little about their finished form, and any attempt to associate O'Casey with the form of naturalism, the cool scientific detachment of Zola and Becque, runs up against a stone wall. Moreover, the drama that O'Casey actually attended prior to his first Abbey productions was neither imported European naturalism nor Abbey poetic drama, but nineteenth century melodrama, plays of blood and thunder by Boucicault and others. And it is here that a search for O'Casey's technical pattern in his early plays might properly begin. The first play O'Casey ever saw performed was Boucicault's The Shaughraun produced at the Queen's Theatre in 1896. The Queen's was one of Dublin's major houses and O'Casey could not have attended without complimentary tickets supplied by Tommie Talton, a struggling young actor and close friend of O'Casey's brother, Archie. Archie had joined Talton in a local acting company specializing in melodrama at the Mechanics, «a well-soiled tumble-me-down theatre in Abbey Street, where no fairly respectable man or woman would dare to be seen," as O'Casey later described it. It was Talton who first weighed the relative merits of Shakespeare and Boucicault for the young Sean. Shakespeare was a great choice: but Dion Boucicault was really quite as great a choice as Shakespeare. Shakespeare's good in bits; but for colour and stir, give me Boucicault!8 And it was Talton who first encouraged O'Casey to see the world of theater for himself. In the next few years, both Archie and Sean were "gone on...