Seán O'Casey (Irish: Seán Ó Cathasaigh) (30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
His plays are particularly noted for the sympathetic treatment of female characters
Early life O'Casey was born John Casey in a house at 85 Upper Dorset Street, in the northern inner-city area of Dublin. It is commonly thought that he grew up in the working-class society in which many of his plays are set. In fact, his family were considered as "shabby genteel." He was a member of the Church of Ireland, being confirmed at St John The Baptist Church in Clontarf, and being an active member of Saint Barnabas until his midtwenties, when he drifted away from the church.
O'Casey's father, Michael Casey, died when Seán was just six years of age. The family lived a peripatetic life thereafter, moving from house to house around north Dublin. As a child, Seán suffered from poor eyesight, which interfered somewhat with his early education. He left school at the age of fourteen and worked at a variety of jobs, including a nine-year stint as a railwayman. O'Casey worked in Easons for a short while, in the newspaper distribution business, but was sacked for not taking off his cap when collecting his wage packet.
From the early 1890s, Seán and his older brother, Archie, put on performances of plays by Dion Boucicault and William Shakespeare in the family home. Seán also got a small part in Boucicault's The Shaughraun in the Mechanics' Theatre, which stood on what was to be the site of the Abbey Theatre.
Politics As his interest in the Irish nationalist cause grew, O'Casey joined the Gaelic League in 1906 and learned the Irish language. He also learned to play the Irish pipes and was a founder and Secretary of the St. Laurence O'Toole Pipe Band. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which had been established by Jim Larkin to represent the interests of the unskilled labourers who inhabited the Dublin tenements.
In March 1914 he became General Secretary of Jim Larkin's Irish Citizen Army, which would soon be run by James Connolly. On 24 July 1914 he resigned from the Irish Citizen Army, after his vote to deny dual membership to both the ICA and the Irish Volunteers, was rejected.
O'Casey and the Abbey O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist, but that ended in some bitterness.
The play deals with the impact of revolutionary politics on Dublin's slums and their inhabitants. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), probably O'Casey's two finest plays.
The former deals with the impact of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city, while the latter is set in Dublin in 1916 around the Easter Rising.
The Plough and the Stars was not well received by the Abbey audience and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. Regardless, O'Casey gave up his job and became a full-time writer.
Juno and the Paycock was successfully filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. In 1959 O'Casey gave his blessing to a musical adaptation of the play by American composer Marc Blitzstein. The musical, retitled Juno, was a commercial failure, closing after only 16 Broadway performances. It was also panned by some critics as being too "dark" to be an appropriate musical, a genre then almost invariably associated with light comedy. However, the music, which survives in a cast album made before the show opened, has since been regarded as some of Blitzstein's best work. Although endorsed by O'Casey, he, at age 79, made no effort to cross the Atlantic to contribute any input to the production or even to view it in its brief run prior to its closing. Despite general agreement on the brilliance of the underlying material, the musical has defied all efforts to mount any successful revival of it.
England In 1929, W. B. Yeats rejected O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie for the Abbey. An attack on imperialist wars, and those that suffer from them, The Abbey refused to show it, and as a result, O'Casey moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life.
The plays he wrote after this, including the darken, allegorical Within the Gates (1934); his Communist extravaganza, The Star Turns Red (1940); the "wayward comedy" Purple Dust (1942); and Red Roses for Me (1943), saw a move away from his early style towards a more expressionistic and overtly socialist mode of writing.
These plays have never had the same critical or popular success as the early trilogy. After World War II he wrote Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), which is perhaps his most beautiful and exciting work. From The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) O'Casey's late plays are studies on the common life in Ireland, "Irish microcosmos", like The Drums of Father Ned (1958).
In these late years, O'Casey put his creative energy into his six-volume Autobiography too.
In September 1964 at the age of 84, O'Casey died of a heart attack, in Torquay, England. He was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium.
In 1965, his autobiography Mirror in my House (the umbrella title under which the six autobiographies he published from 1939 to 1956 were republished, in two large volumes, in 1956) was turned into a film based on his life called Young Cassidy. The film was directed by Jack Cardiff and featured Rod Taylor (as O'Casey), Flora Robson, Maggie Smith, Julie Christie, Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave .
The following table is a chronology of the life of Seán O'Casey.
1880 On the 30th of March, he is born at 85 Upper Dorset Street Dublin, to Michael and Susan Casey. On the 28th of July, he is baptized John Casey at St. Mary's Church, Church Of Ireland.
1886 6th September, father Michael dies age forty-nine. O'Casey gives us a vivid description of the funeral in the first of his Autobiographies, I Knock At The Door
1895 Acts the role of Father Dolan, the patriotic priest in Dion Boucicault's "The Shaughraun" at the old Mechanics Theatre in Abbey Street, which nine years later is rebuilt as the Abbey Theatre.
1900 Teaches Sunday school at St Barnabas Church, North Wall, Dublin.
1903 Works as a labourer on the Great Northern Railway of Ireland.
1906 Learns the Irish language, joins the Drumcondra Branch of the Gaelic League, and changes his name to it's Irish translation, Seán O'Cathasaigh.
1907 Joins the St Laurence O'Toole Club and writes his first stories and articles for the Club's manuscript Journal, which was read at meetings. 25th May, first publication, an article, "Sound the Loud Trumpet" in The Peasant and Irish Ireland.
1910 Founder-member and Secretary of the St Laurence O'Toole Pipers' Band.
1911 Joins Jim Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers Union.
1913 Secretary of the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee; secretary of the Women and Children's Relief Fund during the 1913 lock-out.
1914 6th February, Brother Tom Casey dies at age forty-four. In March, becomes secretary of the Irish Citizen Army. He later resigns, after falling out with James Connolly over the use of uniforms.
1916 Disillusioned with the Citizen Army because of their alliance with the bourgeois Irish Volunteers, he takes no part in the Easter Rising of this year. A detailed account of those years can be found in his third Autobiographical Book Drums Under The Windows
1917 25th November, acts in the St Laurence O'Toole Dramatic Club's production of Thomas K. Moylan's "naboclish" at the Empire Theatre, now the Olympia.
1918 1st January, sister Isabella Casey Beaver dies at age Fifty-two. Publications under the name Seán O'Cathasaigh: The Story Of Thomas Ashe; The Sacrifice Of Thomas Ashe; Songs Of The Wren No.1; Songs Of The Wren No.2; More Wren Songs. 9th of November, mother Susan dies at age eighty-one. O'Casey dedicates a chapter of his Autobiography Innishfallen fare thee well to this traumatic experience for him.
1919 Publication of "The Story Of The Irish Citizen Army". This subsequently helps him to pay the bill incurred for burying his Mother.
1920 Abbey Theatre rejects his first two plays, The Harvest Festival and The Frost In The Flower.
1922 15 April, Abbey Theatre rejects The Seamless Coat Of Kathleen. 28th September, Abbey rejects The Crimson In The Tri-colour. 17th November, Abbey accepts The Shadow of a Gunman.
1923 12 April,The Shadow Of A Gunman opens at the Abbey. 1st October, Cathleen Listens In opens at the Abbey.
1924 3rd March,Juno and the Paycock opens at the Abbey. 7th June, his first visit to Lady Gregory's home at Coole Park, Galway. 29th September Nannie's Night Out opens at the Abbey.
1926 8 February, The Plough and the Stars opens at the Abbey. 10 February, riots in the Abbey against the Plough. Objections are to the scene featuring a prostitute, and to the displaying of a Tricolour in a Public House. 23rd March, goes to London to receive the Hawthornden prize of £100 for Juno and the Paycock. In May he has his portrait painted by Augustus John. It is also in this year that O'Casey left Ireland for good.
1927 23 September, marries Eileen Reynolds Carey in the Roman Catholic Church of All Souls and the Redeemer, Chelsea.
1928 January, moves to 19 Woronzow Road, St John's Wood. 20th April, Abbey rejects The Silver Tassie. 30th April, birth of his son Breon.
1929 11th October,The Silver Tassie opens in London at the Apollo Theatre.
1930 22nd September, film of Juno and the Paycock, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released. 10th November, film of Juno and the Paycock is burned in the streets of Limerick.
1931 October, moves to Hillcrest, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks. In November he writes his first autobiographical sketch, "A Child Is Born", which later becomes the opening chapter of I Knock at the Door.
1932 July, writes A Pound on Demand, a one-act play.
1933 May, his short story, "I Wanna Woman" is censored by the printer of Time and Tide.
1934 7th February, Within the Gates opens in London at the Royalty Theatre. 13th September, leaves Southampton on the Majestic and arrives in New York on 19th September for the American premier of Within the Gates. October, publication of Windfalls, a collection of early poems, four short stories, and two one-act plays. 22nd October, Within the Gates opens in New York at the National Theatre. 16th November, gives the Morris Gray Poetry Talk at Harvard University on "The Old Drama and the New". 4th December, Windfalls is banned by the Irish Censorship of Publications Board. 12th December, leaves New York on the Britannic and arrives in Liverpool on 23 December.
1935 15th January, birth of his son Niall. 15th January, Within the Gates is banned by the Mayor of Boston, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled tour of thirteen cities. 12th August, The Silver Tassie opens at the Abbey Theatre. September, returns to Dublin for the last time on a two-week visit, and meets Yeats on friendly terms.
1936 February, gives a talk "The Holy Ghost Leaves England" to the Shirley Society of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. An account of this lecture is given in his last Autobiography Sunset and Evening Star
1937 8th February,The End of the Beginning, a one-act play, opens at the Abbey Theatre. March, publication of The Flying Wasp, a collection of essays, articles, and reviews. 15th March, film of The Plough and the Stars directed by John Ford, is released.
1938 September, moves to Tingrith, Totnes Devon.
1939 March, publication of I Knock At The Door first volume of Autobiography. 16th May, I Knock at the Door is banned by the Irish Censorship of Publications Board. 28th September, birth of his daughter Shivaun.
1940 12th March,The Star Turns Red opens in London at the Unity Theatre. 10th June, becomes a member of the new Advisory Board of the London Daily Worker.
1942 March, publication of Pictures in the Hallway , second volume of the Autobiography. 16th December, Pictures in the Hallway is banned by the Irish Censorship of Publications Board.
1943 15th March, Red Roses For Me opens in Dublin at the Olympia Theatre, directed by Shelah Richards.
1945 17th January, turns down an offer of up to $100,000 to write the scenario for a Hollywood film of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. October, publication of Drums Under The Windows third volume of the Autobiography. 31st. October, Purple Dust opens in Liverpool at the playhouse, performed by the Liverpool Old Vic company.
1946 26th February Red Roses For Me opens in London at the Embassy Theatre, presented by Bronson Albery.
1947 11th January, his brother Michael Casey dies in Dublin at the age of eighty one. 30th January, his friend Jim Larkin, the Irish Labour leader, dies in Dublin at age 69. 13th May, Oak Leaves and Lavender opens at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, presented by Bronson Albery. 16th December, Irish Censorship of Publications Board removes the ban against I Knock At The Door and Pictures in the Hallway
1949 January, publication of Innishfallen fare thee well , fourth volume of the autobiography. 10th December, Cock A Doodle Dandy opens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, produced by the people's Theatre.
1950 30th January, Cock A Doodle Dandy opens in Dallas, Texas, at the Arena Theatre, directed by Margo Jones, it is the American premiere.
1951 25th April, Red Roses For Me opens in Houston, Texas, at the Playhouse. Directed by John O'Shaughnessy, it is the American premiere. 18th July, The Abbey Theatre in Dublin is heavily damaged by fire after a performance of a revival of The Plough and the Stars.
1952 July, publication of Rose and Crown , fifth volume of autobiography.
1953 20th June, The Silver Tassie is performed in Berlin in a German translation by Elizabeth Freundlich, directed by Fritz Kortner, accompanied by a riot in the Theatre, partly an attacl against O'Casey and his play, partly an anti-semitic attack against Kortners return to the Berlin theatre.
1954 9th June, moves to 3 Villa Rosa Flats, 40 Trumlands Road, St. Marychurch, Torquay, Devon. July, publication of Sunset and Evening Star , sixth and last volume of autobiography.
1955 22nd February, The Bishops Bonfire opens in Dublin at the Gaiety Theatre, presented by and starring Cyril Cusack, directed by Tyrone Guthrie. 28th December Red Roses for me opens in New York at the Booth Theatre, presented by Gordon W.Pollock, directed by John O'Shaughnessy.
1956 February, Undergoes a prostate operation at Torbay Hospital. March, Publication of The Green Crow, a collection of essays. October, publication of Mirror in My House, the two-volume edition of the Autobiography. 27th December, Purple Dust opens in New York at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre, directed by Philip Burton, and runs for just over a year, the longest run ever for an O'Casey play. 29th December, His son Niall dies of leukaemia at age 21.
1957 3rd January, Niall O'Casey's ashes are dispersed in the Garden of Rememberance at the Golders Green Crematorium, London. February, copies of the British edition of The Green Crow sent to Ireland are seized without explanation by the Irish Free State customs office, resulting in an unofficial ban of the book for a year.. May, publication in Moscow of Russian translations of The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, I Knock At The Door and Pictures in the Hallway September, publication of The Bishops Bonfire in a Russian translation in Zvezda (Star), Leningrad, organ of the Union of Soviet Writers. 10th October, the Dublin Tostal Council accepts The Drums of Father Ned for production at the International Theatre Festival in 1958.
1958 January, the Archbishop of Dublin disapproves of a plan to present The Drums of Father Ned and a dramatization of James Joyce's Ulysses at the Theatre Festival. February, the Archbishop's attitude leads indirectly to the censorship of O'Casey, Joyce and Beckett, whose works are withdrawn from the Tostal Theatre Festival. July, as an aftermath of the indirect banning of The Drums of Father Ned, he decides to ban all professional productions of his plays in Ireland, a ban he maintains untill 1964. 12th November, Cock A Doodle Dandy opens in New York at the off-Broadway Carnegie Hall Playhouse, directed by Philip Burton. 20th November, The Shadow of a Gunman opens in New York at the Bijou Theatre, presented by the Actors' studio, directed by Jack Garfein.
1959 January, he appears in a reunion scene with Barry Fitzgerald in the documentary film, "Salute to the Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius", directed by Paul Rotha. 9th March, Juno, a musical based on Juno and the Paycock, book by Joseph Stein, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein, staged by Jose Ferrer, opens in New York at the Winter Garden Theatre. 25th April, The Drums of Father Ned opens in Lafayette, Indiana, the world premiére presented by the Lafayette Little Theatre, directed by Jeanne Orr and Robert Hogan. 7th September, Cock A Doodle Dandy opens at the Edinburgh Festival, for its first professional production in Britain, directed by George Devine, prior to its opening in London at the Royal Court Theatre on 17th September.
1960 30th of March, on his 80th birthday a group of 18 writers and Theatre people in Dublin send him a silver tankard or "tassie" of appreciation; and Samuel Beckett in Paris sends the following message: "To my great compatriot Seán O'Casey, from France, where he is honoured, I send my enduring gratitude and homage."
1961 29th January, Seán O'Casey pipe night is celebrated at the players club in New York. 4th February, he refuses to accept an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College Dublin. June, publication of Behind the Green Curtains, Figuro in the night, and The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe. 26th July, The Bishops Bonfire opens in London at the Mermaid Theatre, presented by Bernard Miles, directed by Frank Dunlop.
1962 16th August, Purple Dust opens in London at the Mermaid Theatre's O'Casey Festival, presented by Bernard Miles, directed by Peter Duguid. 5th September, Red Roses For Me opens in London at the Mermaid Theatre's O'Casey Festival, directed by Julius Gellner. 26th September, The Plough and the Stars opens in London at the Mermaid Theatre's O'Casey Festival, directed by Joss Ackland. 30th October, a double bill of Figuro in the night, and The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe opens in New York at the off-Broadway Theatre de Lys, presented by ANTA matinee theatre, directed by John O'Shaughnessy. November, Publication of Feathers From the Green Crow: Seán O'Casey, 1905-1925, a collection of O'Casey's early articles, pamphlets, stories, poems, and plays, edited by Robert Hogan. 4th November, The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe is performed on Irish television, directed by Shelah Richards.
1963 March, publication of Under a Coloured Cap, "Articles merry and mournful with comments and a song". 27th March, The Theatre section of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow pays a special tribute to O'Casey on international Theatre Day. July, The Lord Chamberlain bans a performance of Figuro in the night at a Festival of Irish comedy in London.
1964 January, he lifts his seven-year ban on professional productions of his plays in Ireland so that the Abbey Theatre can prepare for the presentation of his works in London at the World Theatre Festival in honour of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. 20th April, the Abbey Theatre's production of Juno and the Paycock is presented in London at the World Theatre Festival. 27th April, the Abbey Theatre's production of The Plough and the Stars is presented in London at the World Theatre Festival. August, suffers a heart attack and spends two weeks in Torbay Clinic. 18th September, Séan O'Casey dies of a second heart attack at the Torbay Clinic. 22th September, his body is cremated in Torquay. 3rd October, his ashes are dispersed in the Garden of Remembrance at the Golders Green Crematorium, London, in an area between the Shelley and Tennyson rose beds.
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