Sean O'Casey

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Sean O'Casey
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Born: March 30 1880(1880-03-30)
Dublin, Ireland
Died: 18 September 1964 (aged 84)
Torquay, England
Occupation(s): Playwright, writer

Seán O'Casey (30 March, 1880 – 18 September, 1964) was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed nationalist and socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

His plays are particularly noted for the sympathetic treatment of female characters.

Early life

O'Casey was born John Casey[1]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 tenement world in which many of his plays are set. In fact, his family belonged to that social class that was known as "shabby genteel". He was a member of the Church of Ireland and was confirmed at St John The Baptist Church in Clontarf.

O'Casey's father, Michael Casey, died when he choked on raw fish. 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.

From the early 1890s, Sean and his older brother, Archie, put on performances of plays by Dion Boucicault and William Shakespeare in the family home. Sean 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 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 Jim Larkin's Irish Citizen Army, which would soon be run by James Connolly. On July 24, 1914 he resigned from the Irish Citizen Army.

O'Casey and the Abbey

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist, but that 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), probably O'Casey's two finest plays.

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, which was, in fact, a middle-class affair, not a reaction by the poor.

The Plough and the Stars, an anti-war play, was misinterpreted by the Abbey audience as being anti-nationalist and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. Regardless, O'Casey gave up his job and become 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 prior to its closing. Despite general agreement on the brilliance of the underlying material, the musical has defied all efforts to mount any successful revival of it.

England

In 1929, W. B. Yeats rejected O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie for the Abbey. Already upset by the violent reaction to The Plough and the Stars, O'Casey decided to sever all ties with the Abbey, and moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life.

The plays he wrote after this, including the darken, 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 highly entertaining and interesting six-volume Autobiography too.

In September of 1964 at the age of 84, O'Casey died of a heart attack, in Torquay, England.[2]

The Playboy of the Western World is a three-act play written by Irish, Protestant playwright J. M. Synge and first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on January 26, 1907.[3] It is set in Michael James Flaherty's public house — a shebeen, or illicit bar, in County Mayo (on the west coast of Ireland) during the early 1900s. It tells the story of Christy Mahon, a young man running away from his farm, claiming he killed his father. The locals are more interested in vicariously enjoying his story than in condemning the morality of his murderous deed. He captures the romantic attention of the bar-maid Pegeen Mike, the daughter of Flaherty.

When The Playboy first opened in Dublin, it was the cause of civil disturbances as Catholic protesters voiced their objections to the portrayal of rural Irish Catholic morality.

Persons in the Play

  • Christy Mahon, anti-hero
  • Old Mahon, Christy's father, a squatter
  • Michael James Flaherty, a publican
  • Margaret Flaherty, called Pegeen Mike, Michael's daughter, and the bar-maid
  • Shawn Keogh, Pegeen's betrothed
  • Widow Quin, a widow of about thirty
  • Philly Cullen and Jimmy Farrell, farmers
  • Sara Tansey, Susan Brady, and Honor Blake, village girls
  • A Bellman
  • Some peasants

Synopsis

On the west coast of County Mayo[4]Christy Mahon stumbles into Flaherty's tavern. There he claims that he is on the run because he killed his own father by driving a spade into his father's head. Flaherty praises Christy for his boldness, and Flaherty's daughter (and the barmaid), Pegeen, falls in love with Christy, to the dismay of her betrothed, Shawn. Because of the novelty of Christy's exploits and the skill with which he tells his own story, he becomes something of a town hero. Many other women also become attracted to him, including the Widow Quin, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Christy at Shawn's behest. Christy also impresses the village women by his victory at the race, using the slowest beast.

Eventually Christy's father, Mahon, who was only wounded, tracks him to the tavern. When the townsfolk realize that Christy's father is alive, everyone (including Pegeen) shuns him as a liar and a coward. In order to regain Pegeen's love and the respect of the town, Christy attacks his father a second time. This time it seems that Old Mahon really is dead, but instead of praising Christy, the townspeople, led by Pegeen, bind and prepare to hang him to avoid being implicated as accessories to his crime. Christy's life is saved when his father, beaten and bloodied, crawls back onto the scene, having improbably survived his son's second attack. As Christy and his father leave to wander the world, Shawn suggests he and Pegeen get married soon, but she spurns him. Pegeen then laments betraying and losing Christy, The Playboy of the Western World.

The "Playboy Riots"

The Playboy Riots occurred in January 1907 during and following the opening performance of the play. The riots were stirred up by Irish nationalists who viewed the contents of the play as an offence to public morals and an insult against Ireland. The riots took place in Dublin, spreading out from the Abbey Theatre and finally being quelled by the actions of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

The fact that the play was based on a story of apparent patricide also attracted a hostile public reaction. Egged on by nationalists, including Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith, who believed that the theatre was not sufficiently political and described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform", and with the pretext of a perceived slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "a drift of females standing in their shifts" (a shift being a female undergarment), a significant portion of the crowd rioted, causing the remainder of the play to be acted out in dumb show. Nevertheless, press opinion soon turned against the rioters and the protests petered out.

Years later, W. B. Yeats famously declared to rioters against Seán O'Casey's pacifist drama The Plough and the Stars, in reference to the "Playboy Riots": "You have disgraced yourself again, is this to be the recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?".

Adaptations

A movie version in 1962 starred Siobhán McKenna as Pegeen Mike and Gary Redmond as Christy Mahon. It was adapted and directed by Brian Desmond Hearst.

This play was adapted in 1984 by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura, lifted out of turn of the century Ireland and set down in 1950's Trinidad, and retitled Playboy of the West Indies.

An operatic rendition (2003), by Mark Alburger, was premiered from August 23 to 26, 2007, with GHP/SF Cabaret Opera at Oakland Metro Opera House, Oakland, CA.

A musical version of this play, written by Kate Hancock and Richard B. Evans, premiered at the STAGES 2005 musical festival at the Theatre Building Chicago.

In 2006, a Mandarin language version of the play set in a hairdressers shop in a Beijing suburb was performed at the Beijing Oriental Theatre. It was produced by the Irish contemporary theatre company, Pan Pan[1]. Again, the play attracted controversy when a member of the audience complained about the shortness of the skirt worn by Sha Sha, playing the Sarah Tansey character. Following the complaint, the play was attended by two policemen.[5]

Quotes

  • "... it's great luck and company I've won me in the end of time — two fine women fighting for the likes of me — till I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by." — Christy
  • "Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law." — Sara Tansey
  • "It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart." — Christy
  • "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world...." — Michael Flaherty
  • "...the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed."-Pegeen
  • "Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World." — Pegeen Mike

[6]

Notes

  1. ↑ Bio of O'Casey
  2. ↑ Sean O'Casey, Irish Playwright, Is Dead at 84, New York Times
  3. ↑ Synge(1983), p vii
  4. ↑ "poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands" in Synge(1998)
  5. ↑ The Irish Times (23 March, 2006)
  6. ↑ All quotes searchable in Synge (1998)

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

(NOTE that the Project Gutenberg version is a single file, without line or page numbers. So to locate precisely any reference simply employ a text search on the relevant quotation.)


References


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

Online

See also


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