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3. Sean O’Casey(1880-1964)
Life
No discussion of Irish drama is complete without Sean O' Casey's almost
photographically real pictures of Irish tenement life. Sean O' Casey was
himself a product of the Dublin tenements. His father died when he was young
and his mother managed some way to keep her little brood together. He was
one of thirteen children and the youngest of the five to survive past
infancy. O' Casey was personally acquainted with the miseries of the Irish
working class; he was raised and resided in the slums of Dublin for forty
years.
Because he had cataracts, Sean O' Casey was nearly blind,
blind enough to keep him out of school. Reading escaped Sean until he was a
teenager and this he taught himself. Theater came to O' Casey through an
older brother who temporarily served as an actor. As an adolescent, O' Casey
went through the typical series of odd jobs to earn sustenance except "at
age fifteen he played Henry VI in an amateur production that later became
Abbey Theatre. He was fed up with bitter experience and poverty. He was fond
of reading, especially
Bible and works of Shakespeare. From then on, any
money that could possibly be spared from bare necessities, went into books.
Perhaps this very lack was a blessing in disguise. Knowing no rules for the
building of successful drama except such as he had observed from his own
reading, especially of Shakespeare, he was free to build his dramas of Irish
tenement life as he saw it. If, breaking all accepted rules, tragedy and
comedy follow on each other's heels, it is because they had done so in the
playwright's own life. All his plays are tragic in intent but three-fourths
of the dialogue stirs the audience to laughter. He cared for emancipation
movement in Ireland while he was not an extreme nationalist. He is
considered a dramatist of the working class for his attention on improvement
of workers’ lives and social class revolution’s superiority to
nationalism.
Major plays
The playwright's first accepted play, The Shadow of the
Gunman, was produced April 12, 1923, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It is
considered an autobiography work. The hero is a young poet Donal Davoren. He
lives in a tenement with Seumas Shields, a former patriot, a coward and
selfish man. Minnie Powell loves Donal who also lives in the same building.
When bombs in the tenement are found, Minnie hides them in her room to save
Donal who is believed as a hero and she then is arrested. People live in the
tenement do not try ways to save her while think about whom she will report
to the authority. The fright of leaking out the secret also makes Donal
escape from saving Minnie. She is found killed in an ambush. The work
satires blind worship heroes of Irish ordinary people and reveal some
defects in revolution. Even those educated ones and so-called patriot cannot
face the action straightly. He is not the real gunman he is believed in, he
just lives in the shadow of gunman. He loves rationality but he just lacks
this personality. Minnie is contradictory. She knows few about theory and
revolution but she behaves bravely when facing action.
When his second play, Juno and the Peacock, entered a
successful run in London, he felt free to leave his job as a brick setter's
helper and give his full attention to writing. In the play, peacock is the
nickname given to the husband by wife Juno, showing his visionary and vain
characters. The husband is a drunk and whenever he is asked to work he would
pretend to have some leg aches. After hearing he would receive a legacy he
buys presentable clothes and furniture on credit. The legacy is later proved
a fraud and he is of on penny at all, even in a serious debt. The son of the
family is hurt spiritually and physically during the civil war and later is
executed for betrayal. The daughter is abandoned after pregnancy.
Confronting series of attack, Juno leaves drunken husband who dares not face
the reality without complaint and starts her new life with her daughter.
His third play, The Plough and the Stars, created
almost as much of a riot at its first production in the Abbey Theater as had
Synge's Playboy of the Western World, and led Yeats to exclaim to an
unruly audience: "You have again rocked the cradle of genius." It depicts
revolt in 1916. The ordinary don’t virtually understand what a revolt means.
Men enroll burning with righteous indignation under propaganda. The play
ends in the failure of the revolt. It aroused great discussion and dispute
for it didn’t eulogize the heroes in the revolt while it criticized the
revolt and its lacks objectively.
There is no doubt that Sean O' Casey was a good playwright
and made at least a minor mark on literature. Regardless of a
viewer's/reader's stance on the political messages in his works, they
fulfill the objective of drama and make an impact on the audience. As for
what he did for Ireland, he was little more than born there. He abandoned
the national cause in favor of sympathy for the individuals involved. The
Irish seeking independence were not perfect, and this made them incompatible
with his idealism. This shift of focus to the tragedy of the subunits
distorts the overall picture dealing with the pride of nationalism. He
endorsed humanity for all mankind, took up the calling of
Communism, and
left the land of his origin. Sean O' Casey added a name to the list of Irish
citizens respected as literary accomplices, but he did little to remedy
their wrongs.
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