O'Casey, Sean

O'Casey, Sean [ John Casey] (1880–1964), Irish dramatist, whose best plays, set in the slums of Dublin, show how intimately he knew the people of whom he wrote and the events of 1915–22 from which he drew his material. His treatment of his themes is closely related to that of the Irish realists before him—grim, clear-cut, and satirical; but in his work the comedy of satire points directly to tragic implications. His first play, produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, was The Shadow of a Gunman (1923; London, 1927; NY, 1932), a melodramatic story of the war in 1920 and its effects on the lives of a group of people in a Dublin tenement house. This anticipates, in its subject and setting and in some of its objective commentary, the finer plays that followed; the men who talk, live, and die for an idea are contrasted with the women who live and die for actualities. O'Casey's next play, Juno and the Paycock (1924; London, 1925; NY, 1926), a moving, realistic tragedy, set in 1922 with much the same background, was popular with both English and Irish audiences, though for different reasons, as was The Plough and the Stars (Dublin and London, 1926; NY, 1927), a play on the Easter Rising of 1916 which caused a riot in the Abbey Theatre when it was first produced there. The consequent refusal of the Abbey to produce his next play, The Silver Tassie (London and NY, 1929), which was not seen in Dublin until 1935, led O'Casey to leave Ireland and settle in England. His next play, Within the Gates (London and NY, 1934), is set in London, and gives further evidence of the influence on his work of Expressionism, already apparent in The Silver Tassie. Although remarkable in many ways, it is doubtful if the extended use of stylization and symbolism helped O'Casey to master his material, nor was he particularly successful with his Cockney characters. His next play, The Star Turns Red (1940), was first seen at the Unity Theatre in London, but in 1943 O'Casey had his first Irish premières for 17 years with Purple Dust (NY, 1955; London, 1962) and Red Roses for Me (London, 1946; NY, 1955). In these, and again in Oak Leaves and Lavender, seen in London in 1947, he again uses Symbolist and Expressionistic devices to reinforce ideals expressed by their Marxist heroes. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, seen in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1949, in New York in 1958, and at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1959, stimulated a new interest in O'Casey's later plays. In 1964 the Abbey Players were seen in London in the World Theatre Season at the Aldwych in Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. In his last plays, The Bishop's Bonfire (1955; London, 1961), The Drums of Father Ned (1958), Behind the Green Curtains (1961), and Figuro in the Night (also 1961; NY, 1963), O'Casey contrasts the repressive forces of the clergy and the moneyed classes in modern Ireland with the yearnings of Irish youth for artistic, sexual, and political freedom.