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Sean O'Casey: Plays 1: Juno and the Paycock; Within the Gates; Red Roses For Me; Cock-A-Doodle Dandy
In his early forties, while continuing to support himself as a laborer, we wrote, in quick succession three realistic plays about the slums of Dublin, known as the Dublin Trilogy." Juno and the Paycock," the second installment of the trilogy, was performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1924--the Abbey theatre produced the first installment of the trilogy, "The Shadow of a Gunman" (not included in this volume) in 1923." Juno and the Paycock "deals with the unpleasantness of war and the misery of the victims during the the Irish struggle for indepenence. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
As his career progressed, O'Casey experiemented with expressionism and symbolism, which resulted in "Within the Gates;" "Red Roses for Me," a semiautobiographical work; and "Cock-a-Doodle Dandy," Due to an increase of nationalism during the Civil War and Irish Independence movement, his plays were received well, although, at times, with protest and restriction.
As his career progressed, O'Casey experiemented with expressionism and symbolism, which resulted in "Within the Gates;" "Red Roses for Me," a semiautobiographical work; and "Cock-a-Doodle Dandy," Due to an increase of nationalism during the Civil War and Irish Independence movement, his plays were received well, although, at times, with protest and restriction.
- GenresDrama
448 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1998
2 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Seán O'Casey
240 books101 followersSean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind that is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life.
He was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
He was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 16, 2016
Born that rarest of Irishmen, a poor southern Protestant, in a Dublin slum in 1880, Sean O’Casey was always an outsider. A communist in the Catholic, increasingly nationalist Ireland of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he joined the Marxist Irish Citizen Army but had left before the Easter Rising which he witnessed as an outsider.
The 1916 Rising was the start of seven tumultuous years which saw Ireland’s war of independence, a civil war, and independence in 1923. O’Casey used this as the backdrop for three classic plays.
The Plough and the Stars (1926) shows the Rising jostling for its characters attention with every day gossip while they drink, loot, and try to stay alive. The War of Independence of 1919 - 1921 is the setting for The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), where a young poet lodging in a Dublin flat courts tragedy by allowing the other lodgers to persist in their mistaken belief that he is a glamorous IRA assassin. The civil war, which erupted in 1922, is the background for Juno and the Paycock (1924), where the colourful Boyle family come to realise that the promises of an inheritance on which they have staked their dreams are empty.
If William Shakespeare dramatised the birth of modern England on the bloody fields of Bosworth, O’Casey did it for Ireland in the back streets and tenements of Dublin. And where Shakespeare’s heroes were dukes and earls, O’Casey’s were tragic women like Bessie Burgess, Minnie Powell, and Mary Boyle, whose fates flowed from the actions of fanatics like Jack Clitheroe, dreamers like Donal Davoren, and chancers like ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle.
But despite his nationalism O’Casey was an outsider in the new country. Riots erupted at performances of The Plough and Stars over a scene which intercuts a heroic speech by Patrick Pearse, executed leader of the Rising, with some drunks boasting and brawling in a pub. Instead of the freedom O’Casey craved, after independence Ireland became an insular theocracy where the oppressive Catholic Church, its “special position” enshrined in the constitution, dominated swathes of Irish life from health and education to public morality. The ‘Dublin plays’ had dramatised the Irish revolution, Cock a Doodle Dandy (1949) dramatised its result.
The inhabitants of O’Casey’s rural post independence Ireland are dominated by their “pastors an’ masters”, the church, manipulating their prejudices and superstitions. The women encounter most prejudice; socially ambitious bog owner Michael Marthraun’s wife Lorna and his daughter Loreleen. Women often suffer in O’Casey’s plays, but whereas they are victims of the various pretensions of male characters in the Dublin plays, here they are victims of pure sexism, “Women is more flexible towards th’ ungodly than us men” warns one character.
First Rough Fellow : …It’s an omen, a warnin’, a reminder of what th’ Missioner said last night that young men should think of good-lookin’ things in skirts only in th’ presence of, an’ under th’ guidance of, old and pious people
The men begin ascribing demonic causes to everything. Typically O’Casey riddles this grim panorama with wild comedy; trousers are blown away, chairs collapse, and cocks run rampage, each event causing greater terror among the menfolk. Soon they are repeating any rumour as truth
Michael : (almost shouting) Have you forgotten already th’ case of th’ Widow Malone who could turn, twinklin’, into a dog or a hare, when she wanted to hide herself? An’ how, one day, th’ dogs followed what they thought was a hare that made for th’ widow’s cottage, an’ dived through an open window, one o’ th’ dogs snappin’ a leg off before it could get through. An’ when th’ door was burst open, there was th’ oul’ witch-widow screamin’ on her oul’ bed, one leg gone, with blood spoutin’ from th’ stump, so that all th’ people heard her last screechin’ as she went slidderin’ down to hell!
Such beliefs can only flourish in isolation, new ideas are frowned upon.
Michael : (ferociously) Book o’ Durrow! It’s books that have us half th’ woeful way we are, fillin’ broody minds with loose scolasticality, infringin’ th’ holy beliefs an thried impositions that our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ gave our fathers’ fathers’, who gave our fathers’ what our fathers’ gave us!
Life at such a pitch of hysteria gives rise to grim preoccupations
Mahan : (abjectly) What’s a poor, good livin’, virtuous man to do then?
Michael : He must always be thinkin’ of th’ four last things – hell, heaven, death, an th’ judgement
Unsurprisingly the women leave for England where “life resembles life more than it does here”, a journey O’Casey himself made in 1927. Marthraun remains, a lonely man in a shrunken world. Unlike the expansive panorama of The Plough and the Stars, which used all Dublin as its backdrop, Cock a Doodle Dandy takes place entirely in Marthraun’s front yard. Ireland itself had shrunk. The play was not performed there until 1975.
“The artist’s life,” O’Casey believed, “is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward”. Coming to drama in his 40’s after jobs including construction labourer and shop assistant, O’Casey had a wealth of life experience to draw on and his characters sing and his plays hum with Dublin speech lifted straight from real life.
In England, removed from the vein of Dublin dialect he had mined so successfully, O’Casey’s plays became more abstract and less popular. But he remained a Marxist and Irish nationalist to the end of his life, wearing a hammer and sickle badge on his jacket in tranquil, Tory Torquay, where he died in 1964, still the outsider.
The 1916 Rising was the start of seven tumultuous years which saw Ireland’s war of independence, a civil war, and independence in 1923. O’Casey used this as the backdrop for three classic plays.
The Plough and the Stars (1926) shows the Rising jostling for its characters attention with every day gossip while they drink, loot, and try to stay alive. The War of Independence of 1919 - 1921 is the setting for The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), where a young poet lodging in a Dublin flat courts tragedy by allowing the other lodgers to persist in their mistaken belief that he is a glamorous IRA assassin. The civil war, which erupted in 1922, is the background for Juno and the Paycock (1924), where the colourful Boyle family come to realise that the promises of an inheritance on which they have staked their dreams are empty.
If William Shakespeare dramatised the birth of modern England on the bloody fields of Bosworth, O’Casey did it for Ireland in the back streets and tenements of Dublin. And where Shakespeare’s heroes were dukes and earls, O’Casey’s were tragic women like Bessie Burgess, Minnie Powell, and Mary Boyle, whose fates flowed from the actions of fanatics like Jack Clitheroe, dreamers like Donal Davoren, and chancers like ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle.
But despite his nationalism O’Casey was an outsider in the new country. Riots erupted at performances of The Plough and Stars over a scene which intercuts a heroic speech by Patrick Pearse, executed leader of the Rising, with some drunks boasting and brawling in a pub. Instead of the freedom O’Casey craved, after independence Ireland became an insular theocracy where the oppressive Catholic Church, its “special position” enshrined in the constitution, dominated swathes of Irish life from health and education to public morality. The ‘Dublin plays’ had dramatised the Irish revolution, Cock a Doodle Dandy (1949) dramatised its result.
The inhabitants of O’Casey’s rural post independence Ireland are dominated by their “pastors an’ masters”, the church, manipulating their prejudices and superstitions. The women encounter most prejudice; socially ambitious bog owner Michael Marthraun’s wife Lorna and his daughter Loreleen. Women often suffer in O’Casey’s plays, but whereas they are victims of the various pretensions of male characters in the Dublin plays, here they are victims of pure sexism, “Women is more flexible towards th’ ungodly than us men” warns one character.
First Rough Fellow : …It’s an omen, a warnin’, a reminder of what th’ Missioner said last night that young men should think of good-lookin’ things in skirts only in th’ presence of, an’ under th’ guidance of, old and pious people
The men begin ascribing demonic causes to everything. Typically O’Casey riddles this grim panorama with wild comedy; trousers are blown away, chairs collapse, and cocks run rampage, each event causing greater terror among the menfolk. Soon they are repeating any rumour as truth
Michael : (almost shouting) Have you forgotten already th’ case of th’ Widow Malone who could turn, twinklin’, into a dog or a hare, when she wanted to hide herself? An’ how, one day, th’ dogs followed what they thought was a hare that made for th’ widow’s cottage, an’ dived through an open window, one o’ th’ dogs snappin’ a leg off before it could get through. An’ when th’ door was burst open, there was th’ oul’ witch-widow screamin’ on her oul’ bed, one leg gone, with blood spoutin’ from th’ stump, so that all th’ people heard her last screechin’ as she went slidderin’ down to hell!
Such beliefs can only flourish in isolation, new ideas are frowned upon.
Michael : (ferociously) Book o’ Durrow! It’s books that have us half th’ woeful way we are, fillin’ broody minds with loose scolasticality, infringin’ th’ holy beliefs an thried impositions that our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ gave our fathers’ fathers’, who gave our fathers’ what our fathers’ gave us!
Life at such a pitch of hysteria gives rise to grim preoccupations
Mahan : (abjectly) What’s a poor, good livin’, virtuous man to do then?
Michael : He must always be thinkin’ of th’ four last things – hell, heaven, death, an th’ judgement
Unsurprisingly the women leave for England where “life resembles life more than it does here”, a journey O’Casey himself made in 1927. Marthraun remains, a lonely man in a shrunken world. Unlike the expansive panorama of The Plough and the Stars, which used all Dublin as its backdrop, Cock a Doodle Dandy takes place entirely in Marthraun’s front yard. Ireland itself had shrunk. The play was not performed there until 1975.
“The artist’s life,” O’Casey believed, “is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward”. Coming to drama in his 40’s after jobs including construction labourer and shop assistant, O’Casey had a wealth of life experience to draw on and his characters sing and his plays hum with Dublin speech lifted straight from real life.
In England, removed from the vein of Dublin dialect he had mined so successfully, O’Casey’s plays became more abstract and less popular. But he remained a Marxist and Irish nationalist to the end of his life, wearing a hammer and sickle badge on his jacket in tranquil, Tory Torquay, where he died in 1964, still the outsider.
July 31, 2011
I think it is a bit unfortunate that I had approached this play just after having read Riders to the Sea for the first time. The big issue at stake here is that I could only take so much depressive Irish story, and then I read this one and it put me over the edge. The text is basically a slice-of-life story about a woman who works her ass off for her family, the men in her family - an alcoholic who says he cant work that Juno is married to and their son who the IRA is after, and the girl who is knocked up by some guy that says he had a lot of money and disappears. The play goes on to face the horrible, stupid decisions they all make, and no one is saved until the end. I am going to go drink after reading this, reflecting on how true some of this stuff is in contemporary America.
April 13, 2018
Socialist, feminist, anti-clerical, anti-nationalist, anti-war, caustic, poet, humane, magical, realist, confrontational, truth-speaking: easy to see why O’Casey would be much hated, impossible to see what there is to dislike. To hell with his critics – I love him.
Four plays in Volume 1, each very different to the others and all worth the time to read. All of the plays express anger at the mistreatment of the poor and also the mistreatment of women in a wholly unequal Ireland, socially conservative and politically reactionary, where conditions for the poor are in no way improved by the substitution of Irish landlords and employers for English ones.
Juno and the Paycock is presumably associated with social realism, with its brutally frank portrait of an impoverished family breaking apart in a Dublin tenement. It also observes that, no matter which side they were on the Ireland’s civil war, it was the poor that died.
Within the Gates is a very strange morality play set in a public park. The morality in question is the hypocrisy and utter lack of empathy of the middle class towards an impoverished and neglected young woman, driven of necessity to prostitution and unable to escape without submitting to intolerable conditions. Those in any position to help seem unable to do so without wanting to use the power to help as a means to force her towards their own selfish objectives. It is like a morality play, however, in its curious structure and style; albeit less medieval than Yeatsian perhaps, though I don’t think Yeats would want that said. When I get the time, I would like to compare this with Bertolt Brecht's plays - I have the idea that there is something in this approach but I may be wrong.
Red Roses For Me is perfectly understandable as social commentary, focused on industrial action violently broken up by authorities on the side of the employers, but the play is still a decidedly odd piece of storytelling. It incorporates a great deal of poetry and poetic speech which serves an interesting dramatic purpose, since rich and very beautiful words are attributed to the poorest and most disadvantaged characters while they are patronised and insulted by sneering figures of authority. This has the effect of suggesting a gulf of misunderstanding, while also inverting the social order to make the authority figures and their materialist [we would now call them neoliberal] values transparently trite and crass in comparison with the true worth and inner depth of the people they so despise and mistreat. [O’Casey does not romanticise the working class. He describes their failings graphically. What he values is their authentic humanity in contrast with the arrogant self delusions of a vicious elite.]
Cock a Doodle Dandy is positively surreal and a short step away from the creative madness of the Flann O’Brien novels. Like Within the Gates, it highlights the poisonous attitudes of moralistic and pious Irishmen towards vulnerable young women and attributes this to sexual jealousy. The fundamental hatred of women, sugar-coated as it is with demeaning assumptions of their proper domestic role, with the idea that female beauty is to be deplored as an occasion for men to sin, is very explicitly depicted and attacked here. It is interesting that it is the male characters in this play who are hopelessly superstitious, obsessively religious and priest ridden, while the female characters are more realistic, pragmatic and humane. It is the most outspoken of the plays in its depiction of the superstition for which Catholicism is often but a thin veneer.
A sub text in all of these plays is the positively pagan and polytheistic nature of much Irish Catholicism. One has to bear in mind that this is observed through the judgemental eyes of an Irish Protestant, whose sectarian prejudices are made explicit [albeit without obvious sympathy] in the voices of two characters in Red Roses For Me, but the observations are nevertheless valid. Throughout Europe, Christianity did not so much replace polytheism as adapt it; lesser gods become saints or angels, demons thrive, festivals and shrines are preserved and magic prevails.
O’Casey’s stage directions read very well on the page and enhance the experience for a reader of the text but I have no idea how they would ever be adhered to in a real production on a stage. For example, “... the cock comes dancing in around the gable of the house, circles the dignified urn, and disappears round the further end of the gable-end as the music ceases. He is of a deep black plumage, fitted to his agile and slender body like a glove on a lady’s hand... His face has the look of a cynical jester.” Or of Sailor Mahan; “There is, maybe, a touch of the sea-breeze in his way of talking and his way of walking.” There is a touch of the sea-breeze in the idea that these directions can be staged but what do I know? The plays have all been performed.
Favourite line: Ayamonn speaking to his mother, Act 1, Red Roses for Me: “...when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me; ...” Sean O'Casey has a tough manner but a soft heart.
Four plays in Volume 1, each very different to the others and all worth the time to read. All of the plays express anger at the mistreatment of the poor and also the mistreatment of women in a wholly unequal Ireland, socially conservative and politically reactionary, where conditions for the poor are in no way improved by the substitution of Irish landlords and employers for English ones.
Juno and the Paycock is presumably associated with social realism, with its brutally frank portrait of an impoverished family breaking apart in a Dublin tenement. It also observes that, no matter which side they were on the Ireland’s civil war, it was the poor that died.
Within the Gates is a very strange morality play set in a public park. The morality in question is the hypocrisy and utter lack of empathy of the middle class towards an impoverished and neglected young woman, driven of necessity to prostitution and unable to escape without submitting to intolerable conditions. Those in any position to help seem unable to do so without wanting to use the power to help as a means to force her towards their own selfish objectives. It is like a morality play, however, in its curious structure and style; albeit less medieval than Yeatsian perhaps, though I don’t think Yeats would want that said. When I get the time, I would like to compare this with Bertolt Brecht's plays - I have the idea that there is something in this approach but I may be wrong.
Red Roses For Me is perfectly understandable as social commentary, focused on industrial action violently broken up by authorities on the side of the employers, but the play is still a decidedly odd piece of storytelling. It incorporates a great deal of poetry and poetic speech which serves an interesting dramatic purpose, since rich and very beautiful words are attributed to the poorest and most disadvantaged characters while they are patronised and insulted by sneering figures of authority. This has the effect of suggesting a gulf of misunderstanding, while also inverting the social order to make the authority figures and their materialist [we would now call them neoliberal] values transparently trite and crass in comparison with the true worth and inner depth of the people they so despise and mistreat. [O’Casey does not romanticise the working class. He describes their failings graphically. What he values is their authentic humanity in contrast with the arrogant self delusions of a vicious elite.]
Cock a Doodle Dandy is positively surreal and a short step away from the creative madness of the Flann O’Brien novels. Like Within the Gates, it highlights the poisonous attitudes of moralistic and pious Irishmen towards vulnerable young women and attributes this to sexual jealousy. The fundamental hatred of women, sugar-coated as it is with demeaning assumptions of their proper domestic role, with the idea that female beauty is to be deplored as an occasion for men to sin, is very explicitly depicted and attacked here. It is interesting that it is the male characters in this play who are hopelessly superstitious, obsessively religious and priest ridden, while the female characters are more realistic, pragmatic and humane. It is the most outspoken of the plays in its depiction of the superstition for which Catholicism is often but a thin veneer.
A sub text in all of these plays is the positively pagan and polytheistic nature of much Irish Catholicism. One has to bear in mind that this is observed through the judgemental eyes of an Irish Protestant, whose sectarian prejudices are made explicit [albeit without obvious sympathy] in the voices of two characters in Red Roses For Me, but the observations are nevertheless valid. Throughout Europe, Christianity did not so much replace polytheism as adapt it; lesser gods become saints or angels, demons thrive, festivals and shrines are preserved and magic prevails.
O’Casey’s stage directions read very well on the page and enhance the experience for a reader of the text but I have no idea how they would ever be adhered to in a real production on a stage. For example, “... the cock comes dancing in around the gable of the house, circles the dignified urn, and disappears round the further end of the gable-end as the music ceases. He is of a deep black plumage, fitted to his agile and slender body like a glove on a lady’s hand... His face has the look of a cynical jester.” Or of Sailor Mahan; “There is, maybe, a touch of the sea-breeze in his way of talking and his way of walking.” There is a touch of the sea-breeze in the idea that these directions can be staged but what do I know? The plays have all been performed.
Favourite line: Ayamonn speaking to his mother, Act 1, Red Roses for Me: “...when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me; ...” Sean O'Casey has a tough manner but a soft heart.
May 14, 2021
A collection of four of O'Casey's most famous plays. Each conveys a spirit of the Dublin population through common themes of family, religion, and the struggle to make ends meet. Local color abounds and makes it slow reading as the dialogue is phonetic!
"Within the Gates" was a little too philosophical/religious for me to get into. I enjoyed the family in "Juno" the most and "Cock-aDoodle" was also quite humorous and full of superstition. My real favorite was "Red Roses" which was a more familiar storyline for me, complete with striking workers a nd family pressures. Overall, a difficult, but worthwhile endeavor to read!
"Within the Gates" was a little too philosophical/religious for me to get into. I enjoyed the family in "Juno" the most and "Cock-aDoodle" was also quite humorous and full of superstition. My real favorite was "Red Roses" which was a more familiar storyline for me, complete with striking workers a nd family pressures. Overall, a difficult, but worthwhile endeavor to read!
March 28, 2024
Widely considered his best play, COCK-A DOODLE DANDY is sad, funny, scary, prescient and all around just a great work. Sometimes I find O'Casey unapproachable, but I loved this play. The characters are archetypes and anti-archetypes all at the same time. The absurdity of the play and the seriousness is wonderful: the entire read was a joy.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews