The poverty of Ireland in the tea, bread, and butter world of Sean O’Casey brims with great joy and sorrow.
For those unfamiliar with the work of Sean O’Casey, imagine Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt coming to life in front of your eyes.
Sean O’Casey can write about the songs and scars of the Emerald Aisle because he lived it. He was born into an Irish working class family in the Dublin tenements, before becoming one of Ireland’s most controversial playwrights. O'Casey first plays actually saved Ireland’s Abbey Theatre from financial ruin in the 1920’s but Plough and The Stars, about Dublin’s infamous Easter Rising literally caused a riot as nationalist members of the audience tried to stop the performance!
O’Casey worked for the railway, and worked a series of menial jobs before becoming a champion for labour unions. A renown socialist, O’Casey wrote about Ireland’s Civil War through a series of moving chronicles of poverty – Juno and The Paycock (1924) Plough and The Stars (1926) and his first successful play Shadow of a Gunman produced in 1923. This trio of plays have been dubbed The Irish Trilogy.
All three plays deal with Ireland's volatile political climate and how everyday heroes - families and friends endure it - with tea, bread and butter and a song.
Fiona Byrne played Nora Clitheroe in Plough and The Stars in 2003 at The Shaw Festival.
"My Irish roots gave me a personal feeling about my character. The play meant a great deal to me because I have been to Dublin and I have lived in Dublin. It was wonderful to be able to explore that kind of story that I heard of so many times in my own family. Emotionally to be able to work in that dialect was great. For all of us, it was a very powerful experience."
"In Sean O'Casey's work, there is an unabashed use of language and the imagery is heightened. It's not naturalism all the time and there is an embracing of that. If it is well enough written and performed, the audience won't think of it in those terms. They will go along with it , and it brings the audience in deeper I think because of O'Casey's sense of style and largesse to the writing. That is really powerful to play and to do."
The Easter Rising was such a bold and reckless move for the rebels and then O'Casey centres in on the lives of the looters.
"Well, that's real life. You see it on the news everyday. It's just human nature. I think O’Casey has put a little microscope on the section of a street of a city. Within this big battle there’s these people who like running around taking stuff and trying to figure out how to live with no money, with nothing. They are heroes in their own way in terms of an everyday sense like Bessie Burgess (Wendy Thatcher) – who goes to find Nora. One is too hungry to be logical. You don’t have any food or any kind of real sense of how to survive and so you've got to think of how to live. I don’t think people have the money or the time to sit and think ABC. It has to come "from gut" and a lot of great Irish writing – Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey – it’s gut writing and that’s why people love it so much."
"Someone asked me where’s the tragic hero, 'I was so upset. I wanted a monologue from a tragic hero.' The audience members like to have closure. I said it’s not that kind of world. No one has time for it. Everyone's too hungry and too tired and afraid of being shot. The hero comes in the person who picks someone else off the street. That’s about it."
"O’Casey was there and he saw what happened and he was really against it .He was frightened and he was part of that world. He had his own views on it and he brought it to life."
