Sean O'Casey
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| Born: | 30 March 1880 Dublin, Ireland |
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| Died: | 18 September 1964 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 Cassidy 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 on Seafield Road in Clontarf, Dublin.
O'Casey's father, Michael Cassidy, 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' Theater, which stood on what was to become the site of the Abbey Theater.
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 laborers who inhabited the Dublin tenements.
In 1914, he became General Secretary of Jim Larkin's Irish Citizen Army, which would soon be run by the socialist, James Connolly.
O'Casey and the Abbey
O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed on the stage of the Abbey Theater in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theater and dramatist, but that later 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. Despite the controversy, O'Casey gave up his job and become a full-time writer.
Juno and the Paycock was later 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 simply as 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, at age 79, he 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.
England
In 1929, William Butler 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, moving to England, where he would spend the rest of his life.
The plays he wrote after this, including Within the Gates (1934), Purple Dust (1940), and Red Roses for Me (1943), saw a move away from his early style towards a more expressionistic style with more overtly socialist themes.
These plays have never had the same critical or popular success as the early trilogy. In his later years, O'Casey ceased writing for the stage and put all his creative energy into his highly entertaining and interesting six-volume Autobiography.
In September of 1964 at the age of 84, O'Casey died of a heart attack, in Torquay, England.[1]
Juno and the Paycock
| Juno and the Paycock | |
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| File:Juno and the Paycock.jpg | |
| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Produced by | John Maxwell |
| Written by | Alfred Hitchcock (adaptation) Sean O'Casey (play) Alma Reville (scenario) |
| Starring | Barry Fitzgerald Maire O'Neill Edward Chapman |
| Cinematography | Jack E. Cox |
| Distributed by | Wardour Films Ltd. |
| Release date(s) | 1930 UK release |
| Running time | 85 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Juno and the Paycock is the second of his well-known "Dublin Trilogy". It was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924. It is set in the working-class tenements of Dublin in 1922, during the Irish Civil War.
Plot
Juno and the Paycock is one of the most highly regarded and oft-performed plays in Ireland. It concerns the Boyle family, who live in the Dublin tenements. The father, "Captain" Jack Boyle (so called because of his status as a retired merchant sailor, his propensity for telling colorful stories of the sea, and his penchant for wearing his nautical-looking hat), constantly tries to evade work by pretending to have pains in his legs, and spends all his money at the pub with his "butty", Joxer Daly. The mother, Juno, is the only member of the family who works, as the daughter Mary is on strike, and the son, Johnny, lost his arm in the Irish War of Independence. Johnny betrayed a comrade in the IRA, and is afraid that he will be executed as punishment. When a distant relative dies, Mr Bentham, a solicitor, brings news that the family has come into money. The family buys goods on credit, and borrow money from neighbors with the intent of paying them back when the fortune arrives.
In the third act tragedy befalls the Boyle family. Mr Bentham, who had been courting Mary, ceases all contact with the family, and it becomes apparent that no money will be forthcoming. As the goods bought with the borrowed money are being taken back, Mr and Mrs Boyle learn that Mary has been impregnated by Mr Bentham. "Captain" Boyle goes with Joxer to a pub to spend the last of his money and take his mind off of the situation. While he is gone, Mrs Boyle learns that her son, Johnny, has been killed, presumably by the IRA. Mary and Juno leave to live with Juno's sister and Captain Boyle returns to the stage drunk, unaware of his son's death.
List of Characters
- Juno Boyle
- Captain Boyle
- Mary Boyle
- Johnny Boyle
- Joxer Daly
- Jerry Devine
- Charles Bentham
- Robbie Tancred
- Mrs Tancred
- Two Irregulars
Quotes
"I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the moon, what is the stars?"-Captain Boyle, Act I
"Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis!"- Captain Boyle, Act III
“wore out the health insurance"
“wearin’ out the unemployment dole"
“creep” Joxer Daly “Drinkin in some snug or another"
“Never tired o’ lookin’ for a rest"
“dhrop of intoxicatin’ liquor"
Juno “nicely handicapped” by all of them
“There’ll never be any good out o’ him so long as he goes with that shoulder-shruggin’ Joxer"
“Fed up knockin around doin nothing"
“I’m done with Joxer…I’m a new man from this out"
"it's nearly time we had a little less respect for the dead, an' a little more regard for the living"
"Isn't all religions curious?-if they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe in them"
“hopeless till the end of his days"
“It’ll have what’s far better- it’ll have two mothers"
Adaptations
In 1930, a British film adaptation of the play was produced. It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Edward Chapman and Sara Allgood. This is one of Hitchcock's early films. Although most of the dialogue is taken directly from O'Casey's stage play, the ending is somewhat changed. Like other Hitchcock films made for British International Pictures, its current copyright status is at best ambiguous and it is generally considered to be in the public domain. Primarily due to its association with the still-popular Hitchcock, the film is widely available in the United States. A musical adaptation of the play, titled Juno]], was created by Marc Blitzstein (music, lyrics) and Joseph Stein (book), and opened on Broadway in 1959. Shirley Booth starred as Juno Boyle, and Melvyn Douglas as the Captain. The musical version was a flop, closing after 16 performances, but Blitzstein's score was preserved on the original cast album and is today considered one of the composer's masterpieces. O'Casey gave his blessing to the project, but never saw the production.
External links
- Juno and the Paycock at the Internet Movie Database
Template:Alfred Hitchcock's films
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Igoe, Vivien. A Literary Guide to Dublin. (Methuen, 1994) ISBN 0-4136912-0-9
- Ryan, Philip B. The Lost Theatres of Dublin. (The Badger Press, 1998) ISBN 0-9526076-1-1
Online
- 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
- Sean O'Casey - Portrait of the artist as an outsider
See also
- John Millington Synge
- Tom Murphy (playwright)
- Brian Friel
- W. B. Yeats
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