O'Casey Plaque in Saint Patrick's Park, Dublin (Photo by Emkaer, Wikimedia Commons)
A boy named John Casey was born on March 30, 1880 into a Protestant family that lived in the predominantly Catholic area of Dublin’s Northside (Moran 8). As a young man John Casey Gaelicized his name to Seán Ó Cathasaigh, later Anglicized to Seán O’Casey (Moran 12, Krause 6). The details of his childhood have historically been exaggerated due to his focus on those in poverty in his works and his own autobiographies which his biographer Christopher Murray describes as “a form of self-dramatization” rather than strict fact (12). While O’Casey claimed he was the youngest of thirteen children, eight of whom having died in infancy, it appears he was the youngest of only seven or eight, two of whom (both named John) having died in infancy (19). As Murray notes, O’Casey always ideologically “insisted that the family lived in tenements and inferentially in dire poverty” (17) However further investigations since O’Casey’s death have found that O’Casey’s father Michael Casey’s work as a clerk for a protestant evangelical group paid him a wage slightly less than that of a skilled tradesman at the time, placing the family in the lower middle class rather than extreme poverty (15). It is likely, then, that the Casey family chose to live in the slums of Dublin strategically “in order to live in close proximity to a very large group of unsaved souls living in stark material deprivation” (Moran 8).
At the same time, O’Casey did witness firsthand the squalor the poor in Dublin were forced to live in, and himself suffered from a horrible infectious eye disease called trachoma that affected his school attendance, though his sister who had trained as a school teacher helped him learn to read and write despite the illness (10-11). As a young boy he and his brother enjoyed watching melodrama at the Queen’s Theatre in Dublin and acting out scenes Boucicault and Shakespeare with each other at home, an early education in theater later looked over by many in his lifetime who thought the playwright had sprung fully formed out of the tenements with no training (11).
Due to his lower-middle class background and protestant upbringing O’Casey was able to secure a job selling hardware and china, however he had trouble holding down a white-collar job and ended up working as a casual laborer (11-12). This move into the predominantly Catholic labouring class formed O’Casey’s politics as he Gaelicized his name, began exploring Catholicism, and around 1905 joined the IRB, “a secret, oath-bound group dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of British rule in Ireland” (13). However, he would soon prove more committed to socialism than nationalism, working with labour groups and providing aid during strikes. Before the Easter Rising of 1916, O’Casey had distanced himself from the nationalists as he felt they had left behind the struggles of workers in their strict focus on independence from Britain (15).
O’Casey began writing his own plays soon after the Easter Rising of 1916, working and performing with a local theater club connected to his political leanings. He eventually however began trying to get a play of his produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and after years of attempts they accepted his sixth submission, which would become The Shadow of a Gunman, produced in 1923. The play was a success, and the Abbey produced Juno and the Paycock in 1924 and The Plough and the Stars in 1926, these plays quickly becoming viewed as great works, despite the riot that broke out in response to the third play’s critique of those involved in the Easter Rising (19-20).
Later the same year riots broke out in the audience of The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey moved to London, remaining in England for the rest of his life. The Abbey rejected his next play, The Silver Tassie, making him quite angry with Ireland for rejecting him, and leading him to focus on producing his work in London (22). In London, O’Casey married the Dublin-born actress Eileen Carey (21). The two moved to Devon for their children to attend a school there, where O’Casey lived for the rest of his life (26). On Friday, the 18th of September 1964, the 84-year-old O’Casey died of coronary thrombosis in an ambulance after suffering nose bleeds and pains in his side, in “such a peaceful manner that nobody had actually noticed the moment of his passing” (32).
Sean and Eileen after their wedding at the Church of All Souls in Chelsea