Sean O’Casey

JUST as the Statue of Liberty greeted thousands of Irish emigres with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Irish playwright Sean O’Casey asked for the same: he wanted his working-class compatriots to “breathe free” – through the stories he told.

In a new biography of O’Casey, whose work was performed at the Unity Theatre in Somers Town, author Paul O’Brien brings alive a writer who had politics running through him like a seam of iron.

To consider his plays and their context means considering his politics and the times he lived through, says the author, activist and historian.

“Any discussion of O’Casey’s drama inevitably breaks out of the realm of aesthetics and into the realm of politics,” Paul writes.

“Sean O’Casey wrote for a purpose, and his work bears the imprint of its time and place.”

Born into a Dublin-based Protestant family in 1880, he was given the name John Casey.

His father died when he was a child, leaving his mother to care for 12 children.

He left school aged 14 and spent nine years working on the railways.

The author points out that these formative years created deep-rooted beliefs –- “his experience as a labourer, underfed and exploited, that heightened his interest in socialism” – and it would give him the stories and characters to fill his plays.

O’Casey the writer was forged in an atmosphere of socialism and a free and united Ireland. Influenced by the likes of Michael Davitt, a socialist and agrarian activist, his early life saw questions of Home Rule and how to build a fairer Ireland the mainstay of political discourse.

He joined the Gaelic League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. This further shaped O’Casey’s beliefs and saw him turn John Casey into Sean O’Casey.

We learn of a youth that saw him develop a love of drama. “O’Casey was an avid reader,” cites Paul.

“Especially Shakespeare and [the Irish playwright Dion] Boucicault.”

His brother had a collection of 100 plays bound in a single edition and O’Casey read it cover to cover.

He claimed Shakespeare “tapped on the window” when he was 12 years old.

In 1915, Sean moved from political activism to turning his experiences into plays.

The Abbey Theatre produced three of his works – The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, which were well received.

Unity Theatre’s playbill for Juno and the Paycock

He would move to London after his anti-war piece The Silver Tassie did not get a stage in Ireland.

Paul traces key Nationalist figures O’Casey heard: Trade Unionist James Larkin came to Dublin in 1907 to organise workers. He was a brilliant public speaker, a “man who could use words as weapons,” writes Paul.

“His style was literary, rhetorical and biblical, and it touched the soul of the Irish working class.

“This was the template O’Casey was looking for. The literary tradition of John Mitchel, James Fintan Lalor, Shakespeare and the King James Bible fused with the hard-edged demands of the socialist movement. O’Casey refined and shaped this way of writing into a weapon of class warfare. Larkin gave him his subject.”

O’Casey was sacked from a job on the Great Northern Railway in 1911. It was a turning point. No longer tied to 12-hour shifts, he had time to write and campaign. In 1913, a newspaper industry dispute blew up as union members were told to bin their memberships or lose their jobs. O’Casey wrote articles in support of the strikers, which spread into other industries.

We follow O’Casey from the streets of Dublin to success in England, and Paul shows how for a child born in slums, the 1920s and 1930s saw O’Casey make contacts in unlikely places.

He was friends with socialite Lady Londonderry – a peculiar aspect, Paul writes, that Sean was comfortable moving in the Londonderry set, which was profoundly right wing.

It was at a party hosted by the Londonderrys he met Ramsay MacDonald, the PM during the National Government years who had been kicked out of the Labour Party.

MacDonald invited O’Casey to Chequers, and wrote: “You understand so many things which the ordinary person does not.”

His moves in exalted company did not sit well in Dublin, with views expressed he was playing the “stage Irishman” for posh Londoners and that he had got heady on publicity.

Author Paul O’Brien

“What attraction O’Casey had for upper-class women is difficult to ascertain,” adds Paul.

“He had a succession of friendships with the leading lights of British society – Lady Londonderry, Lady Astor, Lady Lavery and Lady Rhondda. While he did dine with Lady Ottoline Morrell on one occasion, he had little time for her left wing and more liberal Bloomsbury set of writers and artists. He disliked their writing as he believed they had sucked all the life force and vitality from literature.”

Lady Londonderry provided funds and Lady Astor provided comfortable hospitality for O’Casey and family when they needed a place to stay.

“Despite this frivolity, he had not reneged on his political beliefs,” writes Paul.

“The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War reignited his active support for the socialist movement and in particularly for the USSR.”

The political situation in Europe saw him respond with The Star Turns Red, Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me.

In 1939 O’Casey had offered The Star Turns Red to the Abbey Theatre in Ireland but had no response – so the Unity Theatre produced it.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office had judged the play “subversive” and banned any public performance – but the Unity was a private members’ club so the ban could not apply.

The schism over the war – with the Nazi-Soviet pact splitting the anti-fascist front – and the tensions showed in the Unity membership.

“O’Casey had an uneasy relationship with the Unity Theatre Club,” adds Paul, representative of the arguments ranging on the left about a Popular Front against Fascism.

The post-war period saw O’Casey focus on life in Ireland. His works highlighted what he saw as an “oppressive Catholic theocracy”, and blamed the church’s decline on what Paul calls “the morbid obsession of the church with sex”.

He considered these issues in plays such as Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy and The Drums of Father Ned.

But many did not – or could not – recognise the reactionary role of the church. Irish social commentators said O’Casey was out of touch.

As Paul points out, O’Casey was right: “given the shocking revelations about clerical physical and sexual abuse, the situation in Ireland was even worse than that portrayed by O’Casey”.

Paul’s book reveals a man with deeply held convictions and the ability to express them.

“His anger was based, not on his dislike for mankind, but on his love for it,” adds the author.

• Seán O’Casey, Political Activist and Writer. By Paul O’Brien, with foreword by Shivaun O’Casey, University Press, £45