Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition

8. The Sean O’Casey Era and After

87 The Sean O’Casey Era and After S E A N O’C A S E Y (1880 –1964) A F T E R S Y NG E , the next truly world-renowned dramatist to arise from the Irish theater was Sean O’Casey. His three tragicomedies, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), are centered on the then recent events of the War of Independence and the Civil War and are set in the Dublin slums that O’Casey knew so well. They turned the Irish theater for a while toward bitter social criticism: O’Casey’s dark thesis was that the acclaimed and glorified birth of a nation was accompanied by the pathetic suffering, powerlessness, and tragedy of the unknown and little-regarded common people swept up and drowned in the raging, mindless torrent of history. O’Casey was a self-taught playwright. He came to his art by seeing some plays in Dublin, but mostly by reading playwrights such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Shakespeare, and the other Elizabethans. He also read the plays of the most popular Irish dramatist of the nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault, from whom he learned much about dramatic structure. O’Casey is the playwright of the disintegrating community and of the fragile family that in the end has only love (but can’t even count on that). O’Casey’s ear for the dialect of the Dublin tenements is very sharp. He had heard enough of it. Like Synge, he shaped and lyricized dialogue, adding dignity to the utterances of the poor. 88 | PL A Y W R IG H T S A N D PL A Y S After the Dublin trilogy, O’Casey, having written out of his system much of his cynicism and skepticism regarding Irish government , patriotism, religion, and politics, became more and more an experimental dramatist, but The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars stand as monuments that rose unexpectedly in the very shadow of the Abbey—and out of the pain of a compassionate person who shared with many others the disillusionment with life and society’s institutions that came when the heady achievement of independence, alas, did not lead to promised peace or work or food. Born John Casey, Sean was the youngest of five surviving children in a lower-middle-class Dublin Protestant family that sank to working-class status after the death of the father—a clerk for the Irish Church (Protestant) Mission—when O’Casey was three. The family moved often, each time to less-comfortable quarters. Crowded Dublin was a very unhealthy place for adults as well as for children in the late nineteenth century. It is difficult to know the full details of O’Casey’s childhood because the writer tended to mythologize it. Clearly, his mother Susan O’Casey did all she could to maintain a degree of respectability for the family. Sean was sickly, malnourished, and troubled with life-long vision problems caused by trachoma, which prevented him from obtaining more than a cursory elementary education. His sister Isabella, a schoolmistress, provided most of his early education, teaching her younger brother to read. O’Casey found employment as a laborer. At night, he pursued his religious and political interests: his local church; the Orange Lodge for Protestant men; the Gaelic League, which he joined in 1906 and where he studied Irish (and Gaelicized his name to “Sean O’Cathasaigh”); the Irish Republican Brotherhood; and the Irish Citizens Army, the political and militant arm of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. One by one, however, these organizations disappointed him, and, disgruntled, he shed them all. T H E S E A N O’C A S E Y E R A A N D A F T E R | 89 He resigned from the Irish Citizens Army when the organization backed Patrick Pearse’s call for revolt, and O’Casey criticized the fateful Easter Rising of 1916. At this time, O’Casey began writing journalism, history, poetry, and even greeting-card verses for a Dublin publisher. He eventually came to dramatic writing after realizing when he was in his forties that he could use his lifetime of observing Dublin tenement life to provide authentic dialogue. The venue for his dramatic ambitions, the Abbey Theatre, was within easy walking...