O’Casey, Sean << shawn >> (1880-1964), was perhaps the greatest Irish playwright of his time. He was born on March 30, 1880, in the Dublin slums and was largely self-educated. He gained fame when Dublin’s Abbey Theatre staged three of his plays—The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Each play deals with the violence in Ireland from 1916 to 1924, during and after its fight for independence from the United Kingdom. O’Casey showed egotism, slogans, and abstract ideals, such as patriotism, as the enemies of life and happiness. The plays are full of colorful characters and speech and are written in a vivid, realistic style.
O’Casey left Ireland for England in 1926, after The Plough and the Stars provoked rioting during its opening week. Some of the audience thought the play slandered Ireland’s patriots and womanhood. O’Casey broke with the Abbey Theatre in 1928 after it refused to stage his play The Silver Tassie. Like his earlier work, this play was antiwar in tone, and shows war as the destroyer of individuality and heroism. The play also developed expressionistic tendencies found in O’Casey’s earlier work. Symbolism and Expressionism became more important in O’Casey’s later plays.
Most of the plays O’Casey wrote during the 1930’s and early 1940’s have revolutionary heroes and call for a radical transformation of society. These works include Purple Dust (published in 1940) and Red Roses for Me (published in 1942).
O’Casey returned to Irish themes late in his career. He presented an Ireland that had exchanged British domination for domination by the Roman Catholic Church and the new commercial class. Plays of this period include Cock-a-doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955), and The Drums of Father Ned (completed in 1958). O’Casey’s most important nondramatic work is an autobiography in fictional form. He died on Sept. 18, 1964.
