Form and Content in Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy

FORM AND CONTENT IN SEAN O'CASEY'S DUBLIN TRILOGY In the clash between the splendour of their political ideals and the squalor of their material surroundings he saw a dramatic irony as moving to tears and laughter as a Greek protagonist's struggle against fate or a romantic hero's overwhelming by circumstance and some inner Haw. JOHN W. GUNLIFFE, Modern English Playwrights Reflecting on the violence which attended Ireland's difficult struggle with England for Home Rule in the years from 1916 to 1922, Sean O'Casey observes: During this time Ireland was, to quote the Captain in Juno, in a terrible state of "chassisl" The Celtic twilight exploded into smoky tumult. Armed men in khaki or black, with blackened faces, crouched low in rushing lorries and every whining wail of every passing motor sang of death to someone. Flames from a single rifle lighted a dark street and rifle butts smashed locked doors. Dublin was at war with the British Empire, its regular army and its ruthless ruffians, the Black and Tans. A terrible beauty was in the process of being born.1 It is this period of "chassis" which provides the historical and atmospheric backdrop for O'Casey's first three dramas of lyrical realism, tragi-comedies designed, in great measure, to juggle and juxtapose the voluble and volatile Irishman's intoxication with his private and political dreams of heroic selfhood with his casual disregard of and antipathy for his grimy material milieu. The struggle between Republican gunmen and the ruthless Black and Tans influences the action of The Shadow of a Gunman, set in 1920; the guerilla warfare in the 1920'S between the die-hard Republicans, who wanted Ireland free from all English control, and the Civic Guards or Free Staters, Irish police loyal to the new government of the Free State, reHects itself in the events in Juno and the Paycock; and the Easter rebellion by the Sinn Feiners and the Irish Citizen Army comprises a major portion of the action in The Plough and the Stars. O'Casey obviously envisions this disorderly sequence of revolutionary episodes as a vast and terrible mass drama. Realizing that he 1Information in a letter to this writer from O'Casey, July 19, 1963419 420 MODERN DRAMA February could not possibly capture and· chronicle within the confines of his art the shifting panorama, the kaleidoscopic array of raids, executions , acrimonious tenement disputes and street skirmishes, O'Casey judiciously selects certain special moments, pregnant with anxiety, pathos, coarse levity, compassion or terror, and places them against a shrewdly observed, minutely detailed background of proletarian existence. O'Casey weaves numerous private crises into his plots, but often these dilemmas are less significant and terrible than the larger social condition which they interrupt, punctuate, and reflect.2 Frequently the climaxes in the lives of O'Casey's characters terminate a rising development of tension and illuminate the personal tragedies of little people caught within the enclosing net of historical circumstance . In this sense the private sufferings of individuals emerge as symptomatic recurrences within the revolutionary condition, a conflict which many, especially the women, had no role in creating. O'Casey's basic dramatic intention in this trilogy emerges, therefore, as an attempt to throw into high and sharp relief the encompassing anarchy, a disorder which threatens ruin, not to one man (The Shadow of a Gunman), or one family (luno and the Paycock), but to a city (The Plough and the Stars). Agreeing that the broader social tragedy tends to dwarf or minimize individual problems in O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, Ronald Peacock writes: The individual is overshadowed by the conflict of impersonal forces, of which he is more and more the victim and less and less even so much as the agent . . . A private crisis has little significance for a public eye dazzled by revolutionary and international vicissitudes ... The tragic plays of O'Casey are symptomatic of this situation. His characters, vivid as some of them are, are not as important as the larger political tragedy of which they are fortuitous victims.3 The playwright's apparent objective, then, in using the Irish war as background, is to focus...