BiographyIn the early 1970s, when I was a student, I found myself on a summer evening in the centre of Dublin with nothing to do, and ventured in all innocence into the Abbey Theatre where a production of Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie was running.
I knew nothing of the play or its gnarled history. The production was superb, there was an exhilarating newness about it; there was not a single moment when I doubted the sheer rightness of the shifting styles. There have been, since then, other productions of the plays, most notably Joe Dowling's production of Juno and the Paycock at the Gate in 1986, which make clear that O'Casey's legacy is powerful and enduring. Now that the riots and the rejections belong to history, the plays stand supreme.
O'Casey was, like Synge and Beckett, a difficult figure, attracted to the shadows and the margins, unable to join any group for long. The talent of all three seemed to stem somewhat from a personal shyness or liminal position; they were fascinated by excitement, their theatrical skills flourishing almost in spite of their education and background. There are times in Christopher Murray's scrupulous and finely researched new biography of Sean O'Casey when Murray becomes impatient with O'Casey's irascibility and stubbornness, but these properties seem to be at the very centre of O'Casey's complex personality. Without them he might have become a mere chronicler of his time rather than one of its greatest artists.
Anyone writing about O'Casey's early life must read the author's own versions of these years very carefully. Like Trollope's autobiographies and those of Yeats, O'Casey's were written to satisfy the needs of the moment; the reconstruction of a self was done by the reinventing of one. Murray makes clear that O'Casey may have come from a more conventional background and have had a more conventional early education than he later suggested. Murray reads the autobiographies and the later interviews with a real intelligence and tact. His analysis of the unpublished or semi-erased sections of the books casts a very convincing light on the elements of uncertainty around O'Casey' s motives and intentions.
Sean O'Casey, the last of five surviving children, was born into a Protestant family in Dublin in 1880. His father, who died when he was six, worked for the Irish Church Missions. O'Casey's childhood was blighted by an eye infection, which continued to disturb him in his adult years.
In the period when O'Casey was a young man, Ireland was, in Yeats's phrase, like "soft wax". O'Casey, with many others, was melted down and re-shaped by the fervid passions which took hold of young people in the years between the death of Parnell and the 1916 Rising. He became, with his brother Isaac, involved in the amateur theatrical movement. He later joined the Gaelic League, allowing it to take up most of his spare time; he also joined the IRB. He worked as a labourer on the railways, and soon he became involved in the Labour movement. He was a follower of Larkin all of his life, and a communist. He never warmed to Connolly and had, more or less, abandoned his nationalism by the time of the Rising. It was inevitable, as cultural nationalism moved him out of his own class, that he would fall in love with someone outside his league. His doomed effort to woo Maire Keating and his use of her in later plays are important themes in Murray's book.
"O'Casey's language is never as innocent as it looks on the page," Murray writes. "It is shot through at all times with historical, cultural and political implications. In production, the language has to show (or betray) these registers and betrayals. It cannot be played straight. It engages ironically with its own origins." Murray writes well about the early O'Casey actors, themselves steeped in grades of class and status, knowing how language, tone and accent provided a strange map of the city, and cut into an idea of a nation.
Murray gives us a clear version of the three largest controversies surrounding the staging of O'Casey's plays in Dublin. It seems to me that O'Casey had no choice but to withdraw The Silver Tassie from the Abbey and publish the correspondence once he realised the levels of snobbery and jealousy and sheer casual effrontery in W.B. Yeats's approach. Irish writers are always lucky to have London. In London, however, O'Casey needed a theatre company with actors as open to his new style as the Abbey players were to his early plays. He never found one, even though his publisher Macmillan remained loyal, nor did he ever find a few advisers who, once he moved to Devon, could tell him the best companies to send his work to in London and New York. As a writer, he spent most of his career homeless.
If Ireland was his real home, then he had every reason to stay well out of it. Besides the riots of 1926 over The Plough and the Stars and the rejection of The Silver Tassie, O'Casey had to contend with the effective banning of his play, The Drums of Father Ned, in 1957 on the orders of the Archbishop of Dublin but with the collusion of many others. It was, as we know, a dark time, but in Murray's superb telling of the story there are a number of individuals named whose antics make for ugly and shocking reading half a century later.
O'Casey was, in many ways, a loveable man. But he did not play politics or keep his views to himself. His offensive letter to Hilton Edwards, who was interested in directing The Silver Tassie at the Gate, meant that the Gate was closed to him. Some of his other fits of epistolary temper are almost funny. To Harry Kernoff, for example: "My first impressions, against which I fought, have been abundantly justified: you are precisely the little tyke I first thought you were". When a director who had overseen an especially hated production of one his plays committed suicide, O'Casey did not soften: "The fellow's gone now, making his exit by way of a gas oven, giving in the kitchen a better production than he ever gave on the stage".
For anyone writing about O'Casey, there is the great surprise of the personal happiness which came his way once he moved to England. Eileen O'Casey, whom he married in 1927, was a remarkable person; he was lucky to meet her. His life was changed by having a family. There is a real tenderness and ease in his relationship with his sons, Breon and Niall, and daughter Shivaun. He found them interesting, enough to satisfy any social needs as he lived the life of a recluse in Devon.
The death of his son, Niall, from leukaemia at 21 is a heart-breaking moment in the book, as indeed were O'Casey's published diaries of the year after his son's death. "Oh God to think of it," he wrote. "I buried a father when I was a little boy, and a son when I was an old, old man."
When he was wiser, O'Casey knew that he should not have denied Lady Gregory the chance to see him happy. For some years, they had one of the most remarkable and fruitful relationships in the history of the Irish theatre. As his autobiographies, in their sour way, and her diaries, very beautifully, attest, he was lucky to have her in those crucial years of his development, as he has been lucky with his latest biographer.
Colm Tóibín's play about Sean O'Casey, Beauty in a Broken Place, is published by Lilliput
Sean O'Casey: Writer At Work - A Biography By Christopher Murray Gill and Macmillan, 590pp. €29.99