Seán O'Casey

O'Casey, Sean [né Sean O'Cathasaigh or John Casey] (1880–1964), playwright. The renowned Irish dramatist, who moved from grimly realistic works into symbolism and expressionism, was most successful in America with his earlier plays of troubled Dublin life: Juno and the Paycock (1926) and The Plough and the Stars (1927). O'Casey began to move away from his earlier style in Within the Gates (1934). Although his Red Roses for Me (1955) was a succès d'estime on Broadway, his later plays were rarely mounted there and found a better welcome Off Broadway and at regional theatres.

The Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) is considered the greatest of the Irish playwrights who began writing after World War I.

Sean O'Casey was born John Casey on March 31, 1880, the youngest of a large family living in a Dublin slum. He suffered all his life from painful, ulcerated eyeballs and could not read or write until he was 13, having been forced to begin lessons by an interested Irish clergyman. His later experiences among the laboring class in Dublin, where he worked first as an ironmonger, then as a day laborer despite his frail health, gave him a lifelong interest in the problems of the Irish working people. He was a Marxist and took an active part in proletarian reform movements, such as the transport workers strike of 1913, in which he worked with the labor leader Jim Larkin. Arrested as a political prisoner during the Easter Rebellion (1916), he narrowly escaped execution. However, his later socialist and pacificist convictions, his disenchantment with the results of Irish independence, and his professional disappointment concerning the poor reception of his plays led him to leave Ireland in 1926. He announced that his exile was final in 1928, when the Abbey Theatre's director William Butler Yeats rejected O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie (1928) as "unsuitable." Earlier, in announcing his break with the Gaelic League, O'Casey had deplored the preference of contemporary Irish audiences for a "Caithlin ni Houlihan in a respectable dress rather than a Caithlin in the garb of a working woman" - a reference to the romantic and aristocratic treatment of Ireland by Yeats and his circle. In 1928 O'Casey married Eileen Reynolds, an actress, and returned secretly to Dublin (Howth) for the honeymoon. The O'Caseys and their three children then made Devon, England, their permanent home.

Career as a Dramatist

Not until O'Casey had experienced life as a political rebel, poet, laborer, and fighter for Irish independence did he finally discover his true profession as a playwright. His first three attempts at drama were rejected by the Abbey Theatre, but his fourth, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), was an immediate success. His later plays, Cathleen Listens In (1923) and the tragicomic masterpiece Juno and the Paycock (1924), saved the Abbey from near bankruptcy and placed it on a secure financial footing.

Juno and the Paycock concerns the disintegration of the Boyle family in Dublin in 1922. The main characters are Juno, the long-suffering wife of an unemployed loafer, Jack Boyle (the "peacock"); their daughter, who is engaged to an Anglo-Irish fortune hunter; and their only son, crippled in the Irish Revolution and suspected of treachery. The comic antics of Boyle and his parasitic friend, Joxer, heighten the stark tragedy of the wife's sufferings, the daughter's seduction and desertion, and the son's murder.

O'Casey's next tragedy, The Plough and the Stars (1926), caused riots in Dublin, where audiences objected to what seemed his less than sympathetic portrayal of the heroes of the Easter Rebellion. The action concerns the events of Easter Week and their repercussions on Dublin tenement dwellers, who represent a cross section of political and religious opinion. The chief characters are revealed as a combination of honesty, showy patriotism, shallow opportunism, diehard imperialism, and dedicated communism.

Later Plays

The Silver Tassie (1928), rejected by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory as unworthy and produced in 1929 in London, marked a distinct change from the earlier earthy plays with their realistic humor and tragedy. This play progressed from naturalistic farce in the first act to pure expressionism in the second; the remaining two acts combined farce and grim tragedy in the symbolist mode. The Star Turns Red (1939) was avowedly communistic, although O'Casey in his autobiography later described himself as "a voluntary and settled exile from every creed, from every party, and from every literary clique." His experimental dramas, Red Roses for Me (1942) and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), show his increasing reliance on symbolism and fantasy. The Bishop's Bonfire, produced in Dublin in 1955, was described by O'Casey as a play about "the ferocious chastity of the Irish, a lament for the condition of Ireland, which is an apathetic country now."

O'Casey's later plays have been called erratic and formless, especially by American critics; but O'Casey insisted on his right to experiment with new forms "to interpret our times." His juxtaposition of various techniques and genres in one play - farce, realistic comedy, satire, melodrama, expressionism, tragedy - was aimed at breaking down the forms and conventions of dramatic realism. The designed formlessness of his last plays may be seen as a carrying out of his earlier dictum concerning drama, that a play should be "not the commonplace portrayal of the trivial events in the life of this man or that woman, but a commentary on life itself."

O'Casey's autobiography is contained in six volumes: I Knock at the Door (1939), Pictures in the Hallway (1942), Drums under the Window (1945), Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), Rose and Crown (1952), and Sunset and Evening Star (1954). His attitude toward Ireland seemed to have softened somewhat before his death in England on Sept. 18, 1964.

Further Reading

Although there is no definitive biography of O'Casey, his own six-volume autobiography can be supplemented and corrected by several good studies: David Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (1960); Saros Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man behind the Plays (1963); and Jules Koslow, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Plays (1966), an enlargement and revision of a work which appeared in 1950 as The Green and the Red. An extensive treatment of O'Casey's contribution to modern drama is found in Robert G. Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey (1960). Recommended for general background are Ernest A. Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (1916) and The Contemporary Drama of Ireland (1917); Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (1937; first American ed. 1965); Lennox Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theater: A History, 1899-1951 (1951); Estella R. Taylor, The Modern Irish Writers: Cross Currents of Criticism (1954); Herbert Howarth, The Irish Writers, 1880-1940 (1958); Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (1962); and Robin Skelton and David R. Clark, eds., The Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs and Letters from the Massachusetts Review (1965).

Additional Sources

O'Casey, Sean, Pictures in the hallway, London, Pan Books, 1971.

Hunt, Hugh, Sean O'Casey, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980.

Krause, David, Sean O'Casey and his world, New York: Scribner, 1976.

O'Connor, Garry, Sean O'Casey: a life, New York: Atheneum, 1988.

(click to enlarge)
O'Casey, photograph by J. Bown (credit: Camera Press)

(born March 30, 1880, Dublin, Ire. — died Sept. 18, 1964, Torquay, Devon, Eng.) Irish playwright. Born to a poor Protestant family, he educated himself and worked from age 14 at manual labour. He embraced the Irish nationalist cause, changed his name to its Irish form, and became active in the labour movement and its paramilitary Irish Citizen Army. By 1915 he had turned from politics to writing realistic tragicomedies about Dublin slum dwellers in war and revolution. The Abbey Theatre produced three of his earliest and best plays — The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926) — which caused riots by Irish patriots. When his antiwar play The Silver Tassie was rejected by the Abbey, O'Casey moved to England, where it was produced in 1929. His later plays include Red Roses for Me (1946); he also published a six-volume autobiography (1939 – 56).

For more information on Sean O'Casey, visit Britannica.com.

O'Casey, Sean (1880-1964). Irish playwright and author. His real name was John Casey, but was later changed to the more Gaelic Sean O'Casey. He worked as a casual labourer until the age of 30 when he became involved in Irish politics as a member of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Jim Larkin's Union, the Irish Citizen Army, and the Irish Socialist Party respectively. In 1916 he turned to writing plays, but it was not until 1923 that one of his plays was staged. His three early plays, the Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and the Plough and the Stars (1926), dealt with the impact of the Troubles on ordinary people.

O'Casey, Sean (1880–1964), Irish dramatist and younger rival of William Butler Yeats. O'Casey's career took off with the Abbey Theatre's production of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), a realistic play about pre‐independence Ireland. With the Silver Tassie (1929), O'Casey began experimenting with expressionism and allegory, but it was not until later in his career that he experimented with fantasy, resulting in Cock‐a‐Doodle Dandy (1949), in which an enchanted cock, whom the village priest believes to be the incarnation of the devil, represents ‘the joyful, active spirit of life’. Figuro in the Night (1961) is a fantasy written in much the same vein.

— Anne Duggan

O'Casey, Sean (1880-1964) play-wright; born in Dublin into a Protestant working-class family and christened John Casey. The known facts of his early life are few, but O'Casey started work at 14. He was employed in a variety of manual jobs, and lived with his mother. He joined James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, becoming Secretary of its political wing, the Irish Citizen Army. He took part in the Lock-Out Strike of 1913, but left in 1914 when James Connolly moved it closer to the revolutionary position of Patrick Pearse. He wrote The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). A number of his plays were rejected by the Abbey Theatre before The Shadow of a Gunman was produced in 1923, revealing his critical attitude towards Irish nationalism. This theme was pursued with theatrical brilliance in the two plays which followed, Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Juno and the Paycock, though dealing with the violence of the Civil War, had enough charm in the characters of Captain Boyle and Joxer his parasite to lighten its darker sides, but The Plough and the Stars, set at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising (its title referring to the Citizen Army emblem) caused deep offence. There was a riot in the theatre, and Yeats railed against those who had ‘disgraced themselves again’, proclaiming the author as the new Synge. The Silver Tassie (1928), dealing with the horror of the First World War, was an attempt to break away from realism. After its rejection by Yeats and the Abbey it had a London production, where it met with a lukewarm response. Disillusioned with the Abbey, and at odds with the ethos of the new Irish State, O'Casey now settled in England where he had met and married Eileen Carey Reynolds in 1927. I Knock at the Door, the first volume of Autobiographies, appeared in 1939, subsequent volumes continuing to 1954. In 1940 the O'Caseys moved to Totnes in Devon. Throughout these years O'Casey retained his conviction, formed in his years with Larkin's Union, that communism would provide a solution to the problems of poverty and injustice, views reflected in the plays The Star Turns Red (1940), Red Roses for Me (1942), Purple Dust (1945), and Oak Leaves and Lavender, each of which has a worker-hero. The later experimental works, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop's Bonfire (1955), and The Drums of Father Ned (1959), have a generalized Irish setting and are allegories based upon a Utopian vision of human transformation. In Behind the Green Curtains (1962, published 1961) he attacks Ireland directly, but there is a kind of reconciliation in The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe (published 1961), a one-act play.

Bibliography

David Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and his Work (1975 ed.); and Heinz Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist (1985).

Quotes:

"Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!"

"Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine."

"Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God."

"The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood."

"The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction."

"The worlds a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."

See more famous quotes by Sean O'Casey

O'Casey.

Seán O'Casey (Irish: Seán Ó Cathasaigh, born John Casey) (30 March 1880 in Dublin, Ireland; 18 September 1964 in Torquay, England) was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Politics 3 Abbey Theatre 4 England 5 Archival Collection 6 Works 7 See also 8 References 9 Sources

Early life

O'Casey was born John Casey^[1] or John Cassidy ^[2] in a house at 85 Upper Dorset Street, in the northern inner-city area of Dublin. It is commonly thought that he grew up in the working-class society in which many of his plays are set. In fact, his family were considered as "shabby genteel". He was a member of the Church of Ireland, being confirmed at St John the Baptist Church in Clontarf,^[3] and being an active member of Saint Barnabas until his mid-twenties,^[3] when he drifted away from the church.

O'Casey's father, Michael Casey, died when Seán was just six years of age.^[3] The family lived a peripatetic life thereafter, moving from house to house around north Dublin. As a child, Seán suffered from poor eyesight, which interfered somewhat with his early education. He left school at the age of fourteen and worked at a variety of jobs, including a nine-year stint as a railwayman. O'Casey worked in Easons for a short while, in the newspaper distribution business, but was sacked for not taking off his cap when collecting his wage packet.^[4]

From the early 1890s, O'Casey and his older brother, Archie, put on performances of plays by Dion Boucicault and William Shakespeare in the family home. He also got a small part in Boucicault's The Shaughraun in the Mechanics' Theatre, which stood on what was to be the site of the Abbey Theatre.

Politics

As his interest in the Irish nationalist cause grew, O'Casey joined the Gaelic League in 1906 and learned the Irish language. He also learned to play the Irish pipes and was a founder and Secretary of the St. Laurence O'Toole Pipe Band. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood^{[citation needed]} and became involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which had been established by Jim Larkin to represent the interests of the unskilled labourers who inhabited the Dublin tenements.

In March 1914 he became General Secretary of Larkin's Irish Citizen Army, which would soon be run by James Connolly. On 24 July 1914 he resigned from the ICA, after his vote to deny dual membership to both the ICA and the Irish Volunteers, was rejected.

Abbey Theatre

The house where O' Casey wrote the Dublin Trilogy.

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist, but ended in some bitterness.

The play deals with the impact of revolutionary politics on Dublin's slums and their inhabitants. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The former deals with the impact of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city, while the latter is set in Dublin in 1916 around the Easter Rising.

The Plough and the Stars was not well received by the Abbey audience and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. Regardless, O'Casey gave up his job and became a full-time writer.

Juno and the Paycock was successfully filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. In 1959 O'Casey gave his blessing to a musical adaptation of the play by American composer Marc Blitzstein. The musical, retitled Juno, was a commercial failure, closing after only 16 Broadway performances. It was also panned by some critics as being too "dark" to be an appropriate musical, a genre then almost invariably associated with light comedy. However, the music, which survives in a cast album made before the show opened, has since been regarded as some of Blitzstein's best work. Although endorsed by O'Casey, he, at age 79, made no effort to cross the Atlantic to contribute any input to the production or even to view it in its brief run. Despite general agreement on the brilliance of the underlying material, the musical has defied all efforts to mount any successful revival.

England

In 1929, W. B. Yeats rejected O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie for the Abbey. An attack on imperialist wars, and those that suffer from them, The Abbey refused to show it, and as a result, O'Casey moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life.

The plays he wrote after this, including the darkly allegorical Within the Gates (1934); his Communist extravaganza, The Star Turns Red (1940); the "wayward comedy" Purple Dust (1942); and Red Roses for Me (1943), saw a move away from his early style towards a more expressionistic and overtly socialist mode of writing.

These plays have never had the same critical or popular success as the early trilogy. After World War II he wrote Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), which is perhaps his most beautiful and exciting work. From The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) O'Casey's late plays are studies on the common life in Ireland, "Irish microcosmos", like The Drums of Father Ned (1958).

In these late years, O'Casey put his creative energy into his six-volume Autobiography too.

In September 1964 at the age of 84, O'Casey died of a heart attack, in Torquay, England.^[5] He was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium.

In 1965, his autobiography Mirror in my House (the umbrella title under which the six autobiographies he published from 1939 to 1956 were republished, in two large volumes, in 1956) was turned into a film based on his life called Young Cassidy. The film was directed by Jack Cardiff and featured Rod Taylor (as O'Casey), Flora Robson, Maggie Smith, Julie Christie, Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.

Archival Collection

In 2005, David H. Greene donated a collection of letters he received from Sean O'Casey from 1944 to 1962 to the Fales Library at New York University. Also in the collection are two letters written by Eileen O'Casey and one letter addressed to Catherine Greene, David Greene's spouse.

Works

• The Harvest Festival (1918)
• The Shadow of a Gunman (1923)
• Kathleen Listens in (1923)
• Juno and the Paycock (1924)
• Nannie's Night out (1924)
• The Plough and the Stars (1926)
• The Silver Tassie (1927)
• Within the Gates (1934)
• The End of the Beginning (play) (1937)
• A Pound on Demand (~1930th)
• The Star Turns Red (1940)
• Red Roses for Me (1942)
• Purple Dust (1940/ 1945)
• Oak Leaves and Lavender
• Cock A Doodle Dandy (1949)
• Hall of Healing (1951)
• Bedtime Story (1951)
• The Bishop's Bonfire (1955)
• Behind The Green Curtains (1961)

• Autobiography (6 volumes):
  • I Knock at the Door
  • Pictures in the Hallway
  • Drums Under the Window
  • Inishfallen Fare Thee Well
  • Rose and Crown
  • Sunset and Evening Star

See also

• Tom Murphy (playwright)
• Brian Friel
• Breon O'Casey

References

1. ^ Bio of O'Casey
2. ^ Irish Writers on Writing, ed. Eavan Boland. Trinity University Press, 2007.
3. ^ ^{a b c} O'Casey, Sean; Krause, David; Lowery, Robert G. (1980). Sean O'Casey, Centenary Essays. C. Smythe. p. 1-2. ISBN 0861400089. http://books.google.com/books?id=IhVaAAAAMAAJ&q=clontarf+parish+church&pgis=1#search. 
4. ^ LM Cullen, Eason and Son, A History.
5. ^ Seán O'Casey, Irish Playwright, Is Dead at 84, New York Times

Sources

Print

• Igoe, Vivien. A Literary Guide to Dublin. Methuen, 1994. ISBN 0-4136912-0-9
• Krause, David, Seán O'Casey and his World. New York: C. Scribner's, 1976.
• Ryan, Philip B. The Lost Theatres of Dublin. The Badger Press, 1998. ISBN 0-9526076-1-1

Online

• link to the Fales library guide to the David H. Greene Collection of Sean O'Casey Letters
• Seán O’Casey and the 1916 Easter Rising
• O'Casey at Today in Literature
• O'Casey on the Faber and Faber website - link to 'About O'Casey' by Victoria Stewart
• O'Casey at Art and Culture
• Bibliography
• Seán O'Casey - Portrait of the artist as an outsider

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