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

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Abbey Theatre

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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

[edit] See also

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

[edit] References

[edit] 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

• [1] A web site devoted to Sean O'Casey with an extensive iconography of programmes.
• 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