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Sean O'Casey

1880–1964

 

Sean O'Casey is among the most famous Irish dramatists of any century, largely due to his set of plays about the Irish troubles.  His life was a long and controversial one, and he affected life and literature in many other ways.

      He was born in Dublin on 30th March 1880.  His family had been upper-working class, but with the early death of the father, their social fortunes declined.  As an infant, Sean developed trouble with his eyes, an affliction which was to haunt him all his life.  The first volumes of his autobiographical series, I Knock at the Door and Pictures of the Hallway, describe these early years in vivid if often overcoloured detail.

      As a young man O'Casey combined hard manual work with omnivorous reading.  Like so many working-class writers, he was largely self-educated.  He delighted in all kinds of writers, from Shakespeare to Shaw.  He was also an energetic churchman, involved in the parish of St Barnabas.  He was an early and enthusiastic member first of an Orange lodge, then of the Gaelic League, and finally he joined the IRB.

      He was a follower of JAMES LARKIN [37] and was involved in the founding of the Irish Citizen Army (of which he wrote the first history), though he had broken with it before his comrades took part in the Easter Rising.  His early reading of Marx and Engels had convinced him that their social analysis was correct, or at least true to his experience.  For the rest of his life he remained a Communist, or at least a Communist supporter, if not a party member.

      His ambitions as a writer were encouraged by Lady Gregory, and eventually, after several rejections, his first serious play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was produced to great success in 1923.  This was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).  If J.M. Synge had been a triumph of the Abbey Theatre's early years, O'Casey was the counterpart of its maturity.  His plays were both critical and commercial successes.

      He was now able to give up his life as a labourer, and moved, temporarily he thought, to London, where he married a young Irish actress in 1927.  But that year his next play, The Silver Tassie, about the First World War and its aftermath, was rejected by W.B. YEATS [8] and the Abbey management, largely for ideological reasons.  Nevertheless, the play had some success in London in 1928.  It has been revived several times since, and is viewed by some as the necessary conclusion to the earlier trilogy, bringing the experience of another way, which half a million Irish shared in, home to Dublin.

      O'Casey then vowed to stay out of Ireland, and never returned to Dublin.  He wrote many other plays, and remained a controversial personality into his old age.  These later works never achieved the stature or success of the early ones set during the years of revolution.  The plays of the late 1930s received only lukewarm critical praise and were commercial failures.  They were coloured by a vigorous anticlericalism and an overheated Marxism.

      However, for many of his admirers, his six-volume autobiography, which he began publishing in 1939, is a far greater work than his later plays.  Having left Ireland, O'Casey cut himself off from his roots.  His memory of a lost era in Dublin life sustained his creativity, and he was one of the most admired writers of the Irish literary revival, especially in America.

      He and his young wife were settled in Devon with their three children, where he remained for the rest of his life.  His new plays, such as The Star Turns Red, were produced by small companies; he was no longer a feature of the commercial theatre.  Two of his plays, The Bishop's Bonfire and The Drums of Father Ned, were produced in Dublin, and caused delightful rows of a peculiarly Irish kind.

      By now he was becoming of increasing interest to academic writers.  With the completion of his autobiographical series in 1954 his reputation began to climb again.  This was due in part to the appreciation of the autobiographies as works of art in their own right.

      O'Casey remains a figure of controversy, yet there is no doubt that the story of his own life and his early plays had shaped a view of Irish life, in all its tragedy and comedy, which has come to be better known outside Ireland than its real history.  When many think of Ireland's troubled past they think of it as Sean O'Casey showed it.

      He died at St Marychurch, near Torquay, in Devon, on 18th September 1964.  Whatever the final verdict of history will be, he will remain one of Ireland's, and the world's, greatest dramatists.