Brighter to me than light of day
The dark of thy house, tho’ black clay;
Sweeter to me than the music of trumpets
The quiet of thy house and its eternal silence.
- Padraig Pearse, ‘A Rann I Made’ (Published 1917)
Let us set the scene: It is the 11th February 1926 at the Abbey Theatre, and a performance of the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars is underway. The first few nights of the debut run had seen a mostly positive response, with one or two minor incidents of disapproval, but by its fourth performance, the playhouse had a noticeable presence of Cummann na mBan and Sinn Fein members. They and others were distinctly unhappy with the play’s portrayal of the Easter rising. Set in a Dublin slum, the play showed the effect the rising had on the people living in these tenements, which was not altogether positive. It was not the first play about Dublin slums O’Casey had written, nor was it the first to be critical of Irish nationalists. In the Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock were the first two instalments of his Dublin trilogy and took a similar tone. But it was the first framing of this critique through an historical event through which much of the audience was involved. Midway through the performance the audience began to riot, with jeering & booing and even physical assaults being made on the performers.
Alongside that, as the Irish Times recalls, ‘Widows of the rebels […] gave impromptu speeches lacerating the writer and the performers for betraying the men of Easter Week and selling out to the English’. Eventually, the Irish poet and playwright W.B. Yeats, who was closely involved with the theatre, intervened and said to the rioters, ‘You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be the recurring celebration of Irish genius?’ This politically charged event remains a constant reference whenever the play is performed, and almost a century later, what were initial discussions and stories have turned into a sort of mythology, especially when it comes to O’Casey. As his daughter Shivaun O’Casey said in an interview with the National Theatre, myths have arisen around the playwright that portray him as a bitter man who hated Ireland, a distanced artist writing callous dismissals of the Irish liberation struggle from an ivory tower.
But contrary to these depictions, O’Casey was a socialist and a humanist, someone whose criticisms of Irish Nationalism came not from a high minded intellectualism, but from a deep love of and engagement with the Irish working class. If his plays presented a negative view of events like the Easter rising, it was because they were responding to dominant rhetoric and ideology within the Irish nationalist movement of the time, and to the conservative neo-colonial state that had been formed after the War of Independence & the Civil War. Furthermore, as the dutiful historian of Irish Marxism C. Desmond Greaves emphasises, ‘The most important thing about O’Casey is that he was an Irishman. Throughout all the years he lived in England he kept constant touch with the home country. He followed Irish politics with lively interest and never refused to see a visitor from Ireland.’
O’Casey was born in Dublin on 30th March 1880. He was born into a lower-middle class Protestant family, which meant a comfortable childhood until his father died, and the change of circumstances led his family becoming poorer over the years. However, as Greaves and other later commentators noted, O’Casey had a tendency to exaggerate just how much poverty he had suffered. In truth, a bulk of his first hand experience of the struggle and the Dublin slums that would be depicted in his most famous plays came not from childhood experiences, but through his membership in the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and later the Irish Citizens Army. Through the ITGWU as a rail worker, he became involved in the Dublin Lockout and it was here that he became acquainted with both James Larkin and James Connolly, the two figureheads of Irish socialism at that time. David Krause stated of O’Casey that ‘For Irish nationalists the Easter Rising was the crucial event in Irish history; but for the Irish working class, and for O’Casey, Larkin’s general strike of 1913 had launched the first blow for the liberation of the Irish people.’ Whilst O’Casey believed strongly in James Larkin, and would later in life defend his legacy as the founder of the Irish labour movement, the reality of his political development at the time was more complex. O’Casey at this point in his life was a passionate nationalist, for not only was he a union member, but a member of the Gaelic League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, according to Greaves. But the political transformation of O’Casey’s politics was underway with the start of the strike.
As Greaves recalled, ‘O’Casey showed tremendous energy in the cause of the workers. He toured the environs of Dublin raising relief.’ The lockout was important for him theatrically as well as politically. It was during this time, as he campaigned for his fellow workers, that ‘he, like others, first came into close contact with the slum tenement dwellers, many of whom lived several families to a room in inconceivable squalor.’ These were the people he would commit himself to representing so accurately on the Abbey Theatre stage. It was also here that some of the views he would later express in his plays were formed. Whilst O’Casey’s old comrades in the Gaelic League and the IRB would express sympathy, and the Gaelic Athletes played benefit matches and raised donations, ‘the IRB refused to accede to O’Casey’s request that those of them who knew the use of arms should officially defend the workers against attack by the police.’ This refusal to defend the Irish working class wounded O’Casey, and informed his suspicion of Irish nationalism for the rest of his life. He left the IRB shortly afterwards, and joined the Irish Citizen Army, formed as a means for workers to defend themselves against state forces and strike-breakers.
After what Greaves calls the ‘formal (though historical) defeat’ of the lockout, the ‘Citizen Army was converted into a democratic national volunteer force with O’Casey as secretary.’ A few months later, however, he resigned when the ICA offered dual membership to those who were also part of the Irish Volunteers, disagreeing strongly with Connolly and Constance Markiewicz on the matter. Because of this, O’Casey was not part of the Easter Rising which would lead to Connolly’s death. He would still write things in support of Irish independence over the next few years, but avoided the fervour he had originally expressed for Irish nationalism.
His disillusionment with Irish nationalism growing, and unable to find a suitable political alternative, he turned his energies towards drama, and it was here in his playwriting that he was able to express a critical stance towards the politics of the newly established Irish Free State. His Dublin trilogy would portray the history of Irish liberation from the Easter Rising to the Civil War. In the first play, In the Shadow of a Gunman, a poet, Donal Davoren, who shares a tenement room with an pedlar with ties to the nationalist cause, is mistaken for an IRA gunman on the run. Initially willing to play up to these rumours because it wins him the attraction of his young neighbour Minnie Powell, eventually events spiral out of control during a Black & Tan raid, and Minnie is killed trying to hide the bombs for him. In the second, Juno and the Paycock, the patriarch of a working class family comes into a large inheritance, and subsequently loses it as the Irish Civil War rages on in the background. In the final play of the trilogy, The Plough and the Stars, the Dublin working class is shown before, during and after the Easter rising, as Nora, an expecting mother, attempts to stop her husband Jack from taking part.
Looking back on these plays, it was not just the historical content that was important, but the form of them as well. The type of character on stage was a key part of this. What O’Casey aimed to do was to represent the immiserated, colonised proletariat of Ireland as accurately as possible, to shift the focus from the ‘great men’ of the period (and of theatre in general) to the masses who are often the ones who make the movement of history possible. As well, all the dialogue in the plays are written with the Dublin accent and vernacular. As one biographer, Christopher Murray, has noted, if O’Casey’s plays could be compared to Shakespeare, then ‘they were written to illustrate just the opposite of Shakespeare’s histories: unredeemed disorder […] rather than order, democratic man rather than kingship, decentred impotence rather than centralised power.’ These themes would run throughout the three plays in different forms, showing the cost of political violence on the working class population of Dublin. During Act 2 of the trilogy’s first play, In the Shadow of a Gunman, O’Casey makes his position clear on this cost when Seumas Shields states that ‘It’s the civilians that suffer; when there’s an ambush they don’t know where to run […]I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin’ about dyin’ for the people, when it’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen’. This is expanded on in Juno and the Paycock, when the eponymous Mrs Boyle lists the neighbours killed in the civil war, and bitterly exclaims ‘Hasn’t the whole house, nearly, been massacred?’
This reference to the hypocrisy of nationalists was not some imaginary target O’Casey invented to get angry at, but was a real and dominant trend in Irish nationalism that he sought to criticise. In Act 2 of The Plough and the Stars, which is set just before the Easter rising, a speaker is heard outside the public-house where the act takes place. This speaker rouses the crowd with such proclamations as ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood’. Whilst this speaker does emphasise that ‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them’, from the speeches that the characters onstage hear, there is a recurrent trend of masculinism and militarism. Of the Great War taking place in mainland Europe, the speaker says, ‘The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. […] When war comes to Ireland she must welcome it as she would the Angel of God!’ The audiences that rioted at the performance of The Plough and the Stars might have had valid reasons to be angry, but it cannot be said that O’Casey’s criticisms were baseless. All the lines by the speaker are taken verbatim from the speeches of Padraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the rising and often seen as the figurehead of Irish nationalism. Blood sacrifice was a running theme in his speeches, and he even went so far as to say of the First World War, ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.’ And these were not marginal ideas in the movement.
Indeed, the Abbey theatre which produced The Plough and the Stars also produced Cathleen ni Houlihan by Yeats and Lady Gregory over 20 years earlier. In the play, a young Irish couple in the countryside, Michael and Bridget, are about to be married when they are intruded upon by a old woman, who is all but said to be the figure of Irish mythology, Cathleen ni Houlihan. She hints at the sacrifices made in her name, and then heralds the forthcoming landing of the French at Killala during the failed rebellion by the United Irishmen. Michael, stirred by the woman’s arrival, goes to join them, which the audience, aware of the history, knows is certain to result in his death. The family of the couple ask a neighbour if they had seen the Old woman, who had left shortly before this. The Neighbour replies that no, but he had seen a young women with ‘the walk of a queen.’ Now to be fair the play was not entirely concerned with mythology, and did the character of the Old woman to emphasise the oppression Ireland had suffered. In one section, for example, she is questioned on what caused her to roam the countryside:
Bridget: What is it put you wandering?
Old Woman: Too many strangers in the house.
Bridget: Indeed you look as if you’d had your fair share of trouble.
Old Woman: I have had trouble indeed.
Bridget: What was it put the trouble on you?
Old Woman: My land that was taken from me.
Peter: Was it much land they took from you?
Old Woman: My four beautiful green fields.
But the specifics of this oppression are not discussed any further, and overall the play did call for social contradictions to be resolved so much as it openly encouraged young Irish men to go off and sacrifice their lives so that the mythical Cathleen, and by extension Ireland, would be rejuvenated by their spilled blood. As the titular character says, ‘He died for love of me: many a man has died for love of me.’
It was this attitude to working class lives that O’Casey sought to expose. He remained ambivalent to nationalism the rest of his life, saying that ‘nationalism has gained a great deal and lost a little by its union with labour in the insurrection of Easter Week, and labour has lost much and achieved something by its avowal of the national aspirations of the Irish nation’. A direct reference to Cathleen ni Houlihan can be found The Shadow of a Gunman that also refutes political themes of Yeats and Gonne’s play:
Seumas: […] An’ you daren’t open your mouth, for Kathleen ni Houlihan is very different now to the woman who used to play the harp an’ sing ‘Weep on, weep on, your hour is past’, for she’s a ragin divil now, an’ if you only look crooked at her you’re sure of a punch in th’ eye.
O’Casey understood that any national liberation struggle must mean revolution as well as political independence, and that any future without it was that of Nora, wife of an ICA officer, and her child in The Plough and the Stars. A labour induced by all the violence, confusion & death during the rising, the child is a stillbirth. This pessimism angered audiences at the time, and was seen, not unfairly, as disrespecting the sacrifices made by nationalists and socialists alike in the struggle, but its honesty resonates strongly with something said by O’Casey’s former comrade James Connolly:
Ireland without her people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’, and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irishmen and women, without burning to end it, is, in my opinion, a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements which he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’.
O’Casey did not care about restoring ‘the walk of a queen’ to some idea of Ireland. He was concerned, first and foremost, with the condition of the working class and the dignity & freedom Irish liberation should provide. With the recent assembly election in the North of Ireland earlier this year, and the question of a border poll which reached the forefront of political discourse and likely will again, O’Casey’s call to never forget the Irish working class in our demands remains as relevant as ever.
