The Plough and the Stars (10 page)

There are some writers whose personalities and life-histories are so attractive that we find ourselves drawn to them and captivated even before taking their work into account. Sean O'Casey was one of those writers. An underdog all his life and without benefit of more than the most basic education, O'Casey spoke out loudly and often on all matters to do with human rights. Born into poverty, he always sympathised with the poor and the underprivileged. He became not only a playwright of the people but a constant commentator, in letters to the newspapers and in articles for magazines, on injustices of every kind. Indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that O'Casey's whole life and career were dedicated to opposing injustice wherever and whenever he saw it.

But every writer is governed and moulded by the time and place in which he or she is born and brought up. When O'Casey was born in Dublin on 30 March 1880, that city was still a British colony ruled from Westminster. As a Protestant, O'Casey (or, as his name was before he gave it a Gaelic spelling, ‘John Casey') was automatically unionist in politics. Even though working class (Michael Casey was a clerk), the Casey family saw themselves as apart from the Roman Catholic majority, who were for the most part nationalists in favour of Home Rule for Ireland. O'Casey might have settled himself comfortably into lower-middle-class Dublin life by using the advantages of his Protestant connections, even though, being poor, he lacked the privileges which allowed fellow-Dubliners Synge and Wilde to attend Dublin University (Trinity College); to be Protestant in Dublin one hundred years
ago was at least to be on the winning side. But poverty, especially after his father's death when the boy was only six years old, and the eye disease trachoma seriously stunted O'Casey's development. He had only three years' education up to the age of fourteen, but benefited from his older sister Bella's qualifications as a teacher. After that, while working on and off in lowly jobs in Dublin businesses in his teenage years, O'Casey educated himself by reading all the books that he could lay his hands on and his painful eyesight would allow him to study. In particular, he steeped himself in the Bible – a requirement of his Sunday-school class – and Shakespeare (O'Casey's brother was a part-time actor). Finding that Dublin libraries were ill-stocked in the materials which interested him most, O'Casey formed the habit of buying cheap editions of the great authors in the second-hand bookstores. A love of learning, often the most powerful fuel of the would-be writer, was thus early fostered. Ever afterwards O'Casey was a voracious reader, not just in dramatic literature (where Shaw became a favourite alongside Shakespeare) but also in poetry, religious studies, art and music. It is no surprise that the characters in his plays to whom O'Casey is most sympathetic are usually those who strive to lift themselves out of a restrictive environment through reading. Later in life, O'Casey wrote essays on the writers he most admired: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Gorki, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, and many more. The view he adhered to all his life was that books were for all, not just for the educated, and that they were as important to the working person as bread on the table.

When regular office employment of any kind proved impossible for O'Casey (mainly because he could not put up with the grovelling to authority it seemed to require), he took up hard manual labour with the Dublin railways. He enjoyed the outdoor work with pick and shovel but when he insisted on his right to join a trade union in 1911 he
was dismissed. From that time on, until his plays began to make money, O'Casey could get work only occasionally, and he lived a simple hard life with his mother Susan on little more than her old-age pension until she died in November 1918. He then set about making his living as a writer, first of popular verse, then as historian of the Irish Citizen Army (which had fought without his help in the 1916 Easter Rising) and eventually, from 1923, as a playwright for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Once his plays proved successful enough to be accepted in London he went to live there and never again worked at anything else but full-time writing.

The rejection by the Abbey Theatre of his anti-war play
The Silver Tassie
in 1928 led O'Casey into more experimental work. It is often said that the break with the Abbey, where he had learned his trade, was tragic for O'Casey; in any event, although
Within the Gates
(1934) and
The Star Turns Red
(1940) were brave experiments, these and other later plays were not successful on the London stage. By this time O'Casey was fully committed to Communism, although never a member of the party, and this commitment increasingly told against him. His first biographer, David Krause, has described O'Casey as ‘a moral pacifist as well as a militant socialist', and this accurately sums up O'Casey's political position. It is little wonder that when the English theatre underwent a revolution in 1956 and angry new writers emerged, they showed their admiration for O'Casey by writing in a somewhat similar, realistic but anti-establishment mode. There was thus a renewal of interest in O'Casey's plays around 1960, by which time he was eighty years old and close to death. So far as most critics of modern drama are concerned, O'Casey's best work was complete with
The Plough and the Stars
, written almost forty years before his death in Torquay, Devon, in September 1964. But he himself always insisted that his later, experimental, plays were better.

The material of the three Dublin plays –
The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock
and
The Plough and the Stars
– owes a lot to O'Casey's experience as a young man involved in Irish political and cultural life. From about 1906 he was a member of the Gaelic League where he learned the Irish language, first changed his name, and became fiercely nationalistic. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood not long afterwards and rejoiced in writing anti-British propaganda. But when Jim Larkin (1882–1947) arrived in Dublin from Liverpool and set about creating an active trade-union movement, O'Casey began to abandon all religious, cultural and republican organisations in favour of socialism. The great lock-out of 1913, which saw thousands of Dublin manual workers in opposition to the bosses controlling the transport and distribution industries and services, showed O'Casey that the cause of labour took precedence over the cause of Irish freedom. He was appointed secretary of the Irish Citizen Army which Larkin formed in 1914 for the defence of the workers and for a while he was active in administration. But, characteristically, he was unable to reconcile his own views with those of the majority and resigned in 1914 on a policy matter. O'Casey was thus isolated by the time of the 1916 Rising. He became a spectator of Irish political life when he might have been a major participant.

The 1916 Rising, led by Pádraic Pearse (Commandant, Irish Volunteers) and James Connolly (Commandant, Irish Citizen Army), was an abortive one. It took place in some confusion on Easter Monday 1916 following an attempt by the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers (Eoin MacNeill) to cancel the proceedings. Pearse and Connolly, in defiance of MacNeill, led a revolt which failed to spread outside the city of Dublin. No more than 2,000 men in all participated, taking over the General Post Office and other strategic sites in Dublin. This heroic but foolhardy undertaking, marred by indecision, poor communications, lack of firepower,
and lack of general support, was easily crushed by British forces within a week. Pearse, Connolly and thirteen other leaders were summarily executed. It was these executions that changed the political climate in Ireland and precipitated the guerilla war of independence which led to the signing of the Treaty between Britain and Ireland in 1921, and the establishment of a twenty-six-county Free State in the South.

O'Casey, while admiring the courage of those who fought in 1916, saw the enterprise as a waste of life and effort. In particular, he faulted Connolly for deflecting the cause of labour into a nationalist struggle. By making an alliance between the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers under Pearse, Connolly had, in O'Casey's analysis, betrayed the true purpose of the Irish Citizen Army and taken part in a charade. He makes this point in his
Story of the Irish Citizen Army
(1919). O'Casey's attitude towards the Rising, then, tended to be critical and condemnatory. By this time, and especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution (which he applauded), nationalism was for him a delusion.

This was not always the case. His early writings, journalistic pieces and poems, were unashamedly republican in theme and language. After 1913 his writings became more socialist than nationalist but were still propagandist in style. It is indeed remarkable that such a fanatic as O'Casey's early writings show him to have been (as evidenced in the collection of his early work entitled
Feathers from the Green Crow
) should ever have grown into a major dramatic artist. There is something miraculous about this shift in direction, though ‘fate' and O'Casey's character no doubt were other factors. But the three Dublin plays are like the great war poems written by Owen, Sassoon and others: they would not have anything like their impact and intensity were it not for the author's personal and complex experience, which rendered them pacifist in outlook.

O'Casey's plays are distinctively modern and, as an Abbey playwright, he more or less adopted realism as a matter of course. But his plays are much freer in structure than the three-act realistic play usually demands: O'Casey prefers to work from life, combining a scanty plot with character sketches with ‘turns' reminiscent of the music hall. At times O'Casey's use of the group, the ensemble, in preference to the individual hero, is reminiscent of Chekhov's style, for example in
Three Sisters
(1901). But O'Casey's world, the world he creates on stage, is vastly different from Chekhov's, which is invariably sophisticated, intellectually advanced, and poised ready to fall apart. O'Casey's is a more robust, devil-may-care, down-to-earth world, where the working-class characters struggle to survive. O'Casey abolishes the hero in favour of the anti-hero. In doing so, he introduces a good deal of irony and even satire into the dramatic action.

O'Casey extended the Irish tradition in ways which were to affect how the modern theatre developed. The Abbey players who brought his plays on to the London and New York stages in the late 1920s and early 1930s were among the best of their generation and included Barry Fitzgerald, Sara Allgood and F. J. McCormick. Their ensemble-playing held lessons for repertories all over the world. Also, the plays themselves, in their combination of tragedy and comedy to form a new and modern tragicomedy, pointed the way for many twentieth-century writers from John Osborne to Edward Bond. These later writers looked back with great respect to O'Casey's pioneering work, for they too were trying to find ways of using the stage to combine entertainment and criticism of social and political values. Samuel Beckett, whose political outlook was as different from O'Casey's as his Dublin origins, nevertheless admired and may even have imitated O'Casey's use of knockabout farce within the tragic situation.

As time passed, O'Casey's three Dublin plays became part of the world repertoire of twentieth-century drama. Indeed, opinion elevated Sir Laurence Olivier's 1966 production of
Juno
at the National Theatre in London into one of the best ever seen. Further, the representation of the long-suffering mother, Juno, was to be imitated by many playwrights, including the American Clifford Odets and the British Arnold Wesker. O'Casey's depiction of warfare, particularly in its urban, guerilla aspects, showed many other writers how best to dramatise politics: by uniting simple home or domestic life with the world of political violence. This link between private and public was the means of showing cause and effect and how people's lives can be torn apart by the forces which invade and conflict with their happy, careless routines.

Finally, it needs to be emphasised that O'Casey, far from being a narrow, politically biased playwright, always shows the deepest compassion for the sufferings of his characters. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that O'Casey's plays, while dealing with issues of life and death, are invariably and enthusiastically on the side of life.