“The Plough
and the Stars,” “Shadow of a Gun Man,” and “Juno and the Paycock,” plays by
Sean O’Casey, 1920s
Sean O’Casey grew up a clerk's son in Dublin, Ireland, and he set these three theatre productions in the Dublin tenements around where he lived. As such, these were the first proletarian
plays to come out of Ireland.
He was self-taught, not attending Trinity
College as did fellow
dramatist Samuel Beckett. His plays are
in mostly idiomatic Irish English, the brogue, sort of what Twain did with
American slang. O’Casey helped organize
the Irish Citizen Army in 1913, a socialist labor military grouping formed to
defend against English aggression and later led by James Connolly. He was a socialist. However, in these plays O’Casey takes a ‘tragic-comedic’
eye to the events that followed, which brought political opprobrium on him for
his simple and deep humanism.
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| Scene from "Juno and the Paycock" (Peacock...) |
These three plays could be
seen as one long play, really a play cycle, set in Dublin.
They go from the period of the Irish Easter Rising in 1916 (‘Plough’) to
the revolutionary war against the English in 1920 (‘Shadow’) to the civil war
between the Free-Staters and the Republican Brotherhood in 1922 (‘Juno’). All involve the impact of the violence on
civilians, usually from the viewpoint of a woman. The men are many times pompous, foolish,
drunken or blatherers. An arrogant
Socialist, a bad poet, a drunken and lazy husband display their wares. The English make only two appearances, both
marginal. World War I, where many more
Irish died in the English army than who died in Ireland in 196-1922, is muted to
invisible in the ‘Plough.’ The plays are
soaked in displays of Irish patriotism, which O’Casey quietly mocks, especially
in a scene where a man brags about his pilgrimages to Wolfe Tone’s grave. So the whole reason why these men are fighting
(though women fought too…) is obscure, and perhaps intentionally so.
The women – the grounded and
realistic Mrs. Boyle (Juno); the courageous girl Minnie; the suffering wife Nora and
her kind neighbor Bessie – all feel the impact of the violence on their
brothers, their husbands, their potential boyfriends, their neighbors. Two of them fall victim to the violence
themselves. The men say that ‘a principle is a principle’ and that they’ll ‘die
for Ireland’
while the women want them at home half-fed, not starving and alive, not
crippled or dead. A familiar story.
The women are the ‘realists’
while some of the men are the ‘romantics,’ at least in the common
parlance. But given Ireland had been an
oppressed country for hundreds of years, a million died of an English-aided
famine, tens of thousands of Irishmen were sent to slaughter in ‘Flanders
fields’ or Gallipoli, all while Ireland remained a colony of the English
empire, its land owned, its people poor wage slaves, its democratic rights
almost nil – something had to give. So
there was a powerful political logic here that rose above a granular humanism.
The Irish infatuation with ‘gunmen’ and killing shown in these plays - sloppy and
sometimes thoughtless – was inevitable given English oppression. In a way, this continued during the war for Irish
independence in northern
Ireland, a guerrilla war which only ended in 1994. Northern Ireland
today is still a colony of the less august “United Kingdom” - as the Brexit
vote might finally end that. And perhaps Scotland won’t be far behind.
Because of O’Casey’s change
of heart, I imagine he is looked on as something of a political cynic in Ireland. After all, there are consequences to violence, even justified violence. Beyond the politics though, these plays
reveal the hidden lives of typical working class Dubliners in these terrible
times – and that is their main strength.
The dialog is dead-on accurate, the settings shabby, the humour immense,
the humanity obvious. People get into
debt because of a promise of an inheritance that never comes. They loot during the rising. They make do
with tea and whiskey. The lace curtains
are torn, the windows broken and money scarce.
These years have marked Ireland
and the Irish people even to this day, and these plays show how.
And I bought it Chapman
Street Books in Ely, Mn.
Red Frog
August 2, 2018
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