Sean O'Casey

Sean O'Casey was born in Dublin in 1880 and he was the first Irish playwright to write about the Dublin working classes.  O'Casey was a committed nationalist and he joined the Gaelic League in 1906 and learned the Irish language.  He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union which had been formed to represent the interests of the unskilled labourers who lived in the Dublin tenements.

The first of O'Casey's plays, Shadow of a Gunman, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923.  The play portrays the Dublin slums and how the inhabitants are affected by revolutionary politics.  This first success was followed by Juno and the Paycock in 1924 which deals with the impact of the civil war on poor Dubliners  and The Plough and the Stars in 1926 which is set in 1916 against the Easter Rising.

While The Plough and the Stars is an anti-war play it was misinterpreted by the Abbey audience as being anti-nationalist which resulted in a riot similar to the scenes that were seen when J M Synge's The Playboy of the Western World was performed in 1907.

In 1930 Alfred Hitchcock filmed Juno and the Paycock and in 1959 Sean O'Casey gave permission for it to be turned into a musical in America, entitled Juno.  It was a commercial failure and closed after only 16 performances on Broadway.  O'Casey didn't bother to cross the atlantic to help publicise the production and he did not go to see it.

In 1929 W B Yeats rejected Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie for the Abbey Theatre.  O'Casey had enough, he was still angry over the riots during his production of The Plough and the Stars and he moved to England where he lived until the end of his life. 

The plays he wrote once he left Ireland did not have the same kind of success as the early ones and in his later years he wrote a six volume autobiography.  His autobiography Mirror in the House was filmed in 1965 under the title Young Cassidy and featured among others Flora Robson and Julie Christie.  Sean O'Casey died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 84.