A character sketch by O'Casey for a German production of The Plough and the Stars in the 1930s. From the Marsh Library in Dublin, donated by the Guinness family. More can be seen here.
Living to 84, O’Casey’s career spanned over many years. However, his three earliest successful plays, his “Dublin Trilogy” of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926) are his most famous and well-regarded works, with scholar James Moran rather comically summarizing that the general conception of O’Caseys works is:
1) Dublin Trilogy = Excellent
2) The Silver Tassie = Interesting
3) Everything Else = Forgettable
(Moran 239)
Despite this, Moran critiques that while his three breakthrough works might be his most complete and solid pieces, his further exploration of the possibilities theater in his later works are still valuable, even if they could have benefitted from the collaborative rehearsal room work his early works received at the Abbey while he was still in Ireland (239). While not as popular as his earlier works, these later works have had successful productions, especially in non English-speaking countries where directors might feel more comfortable cutting and adjusting the already translated text to explore O’Casey’s themes, something Moran suggests is perhaps more similar to the original process the Dublin Trilogy experienced at the Abbey (240).
O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy reexamine the recent violent events of the Irish nationalist movement, setting the first two plays during the quite recent Irish Civil War, and the third in the only ten-year-old Easter Rising. Instead of the heroics of the wars, he examines the individual damage done to the poor who got involved in these conflicts, while clearly examining his own experiences as someone close to but not directly involved in the battles. As explored here, O’Casey used his plays to critique prevailing assumptions among the nationalist Irish after the end of these conflicts, while not seeming to have any extremely specific view of his own to project.
While often dark in ending, O’Casey’s work was impacted by the theater he viewed as a child and young man, even the more light stuff. Moran argues that O’Casey “fused together a number of different theatrical forms” to create a unique hybrid work that proved extremely successful in his Dublin Trilogy (43). First, he integrated the comedic style of the clownish comedy duos of the Dublin Music Halls popular during his youth, integrating similar comedic dialogue bits such as hangover-based comedy, twisting language and logic, as well as slapstick moments (43-45). Further, by placing this familiar comedic style in a more realistic depiction of the squalor of Dublin poverty, O’Casey makes the audience laugh but then critiques their understanding of this as simple comedy where everything turns out alright in the end by showing horrible endings for the characters in the plays, connected in part to alcohol (45). Aware of the theatrical context of his time, O’Casey used its tropes both for entertainment effect and for further deepening emotional effect through contrasting with the accepted patterns and expectations.
O’Casey’s works and plotting were also inspired by the works of Shakespeare and the melodrama of Boucicault. He and his brother would see these plays when they could as children, reenacting scenes with each other, and elements of these playwrights’ work appear in O’Casey’s plays. For example, a scene in Juno and the Paycock evokes Marc Antony’s arrival with Caesar’s will in Julius Caesar (Moran 47-48). O’Casey included raids of Irish homes by British forces in his plays that are likely inspired by similar scenes in Boucicault’s work, but instead of raiding grand homes of more well-off families, the British are invading the formerly aristrocratic homes of well-off Protestants who left the city for suburbs leaving their homes to decay as they became tenements overfull with Dublin’s Catholic poor (51). Similarly, while Boucicault portrays the British soldiers as “polite and chivalrous” to ensure his plays success in England, O’Casey’s soldiers “bring little other than chaos and death, and scarcely present a benign picture of empire” (52). Portraying the squalor of Irish poverty along with the violence of war and its effect on those already in trouble, O’Casey includes tropes and scenes from the more traditional works of Shakespeare and Boucicault to connect with prior tradition and use elements of engaging theater of the past as useful while communicating his own messages.
After leaving Ireland for England, O’Casey continued innovating and exploring with his works, though none ended up quite as successful as his famous Dublin Trilogy. He, however, seemed committed to exploring the future of what theater could be, continuing to look forward to new forms while also looking backward for inspiration. In an essay entitled “Behind the Curtained World” from 1942, he talks about his view of the failures of the modern theater to connect with the audience, but belief that it will connect in new forms, such as the Soviet Union’s “Polar Theatre” traveling through the arctic to perform in places such as fishing villages, ice-breakers, and scientific outposts (“Behind” 9). He writes that “if the drama dies in one place, it springs to life in another, for drama was the first child given to the first man and woman born to the world. Wherever two or three of them are gathered together, there is theatre” (10). Evoking (or coopting?) biblical language for his view of theatre here, the at this point nonreligious O’Casey goes on to praise the historical English tradition of religious theater, such as the recorded Quem Quarentis rite to be performed by monks and the later mystery and morality plays portrayed by amateurs throughout the British countryside. He calls for a return to a theater more closely related to the people’s ritual and folklore, perhaps related to his socialist belief in the value of the common people. He posits that “it will be a theatre preserving all the delicate grace, beauty, and majesty of line that have been born before us, adding the sturdiness and lusty life of the present-day descendants of coopers, fullers, armourers, bowmakers, and all of a bygone generation, so that the theatre may become a passionate, graceful, and colourful part of English life” (19). While his later works never proved as popular as his early ones, his idea for a theater that truly incorporates every part of society, not just a select elite, has persisted as a noble goal for many since, and is an interesting representation of the character of this socialist artist and his dreams for what theater could be.
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