Red Roses for Me

by Seán O'Casey

A play in four acts.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Literature, Irish Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Sean 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.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Roses for Me—a play about a young working man in the Dublin slums in the days before the Lockout of 1913—debuted at the Dublin Olympia in 1943, more than fifteen years after Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, Sean O’Casey’s two universally acknowledged masterpieces, were first performed at the Abbey. Red Roses, although considered one of the best of the author’s later expressionist plays, is often deemed inferior to the two mentioned above. I disagree.

Although its mood is more elegaic, its action less intense, and its dialogue less amusing, its historical observations are just as sharp, the poetry of its Irish speech just as lyrical, and its people just as vividly imagined as in the two earlier plays. Moreover, it seems to me more deeply felt, a work close to O’Casey’s heart. Its portrait of the young protagonist Ayamonn Breydon, a young Protestant working man with a passion for many things, including painting, Shakespeare, and social justice, is wistfully autobiographical, and its language—particularly in the expressionistic last act—gives us O’Casey’s most poetic exploration of the blighted and beautiful Dublin he loved, the city of his birth.

Here are two excerpts, to give you a taste of the language. First, Ayamonn Breydon speaks to his girlfriend Sheila who tells him that “we must look well ahead on the road to the future” to make “it possible for us to live together.”

”We live together now; live in the light of the burning bush. I tell you life is not one thing, but many things, a wide branching flame, grand and good to see and feel, dazzling to the eye of no-one loving it. I am not one to carry fear about with me as a priest carries a host. Let the timid tiptoe throught the way where the paler blossoms grow; my feet shall be where the redder roses grow, though they bear long thorns, sharp and piercing, thing among them!”

Later, Ayamonn marvels of the transformation wrought on dingy old Dublin by the setting sun:

Look! Th’ vans an’ lorries rattling down th’ quays, turned to bronze an’ purple by th’ sun, look like chariots forging forward to th’ battle-front...There’s th’ great dome o’ th’ Four Courts lookin’ like a golden rose in a great bronze bowl! An’ th' river flowin’ below it, a purple flood, marbled with ripples o’ scarlet; watch th’ seagulls gliding over it — like restless white pearls astir on a royal breast. Our city’s in the grip o’ God!”

[Szijártó Máté · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the tension rises slowly, there aren't any turning points in the story, and it doesn't make you want to read further. Basically everything can be known upfront after reading the first act. The characters feel underdeveloped, and personally the writer's notes are uselessly lengthy, and too strict, leaving few place for one's imagination.

[Mohamedridha Alaskari محمد رضا العسكري · Rating 3 out of 5]

واحدة من روائع المسرح العالمي!

[Julian Munds · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sean O'Casey is a master of dialect and sound, but his play is also a mishmash of half finished ideas and scenes. He did experience these events that he shows here, and I would love to see a production of this, but I think this play might work better as an opera than a play. The first two acts seem out of place with the last two. An experiment, that is not sure what it wants to be.

[أحمد · Rating 2 out of 5]

هناك فقرة طريفة في مقدمة المترجم لهذه المسرحية القصيرة تقول:

ودأبت ليدي جريجوري على تشجيع أوكيسي وحثّه على أن يكتب عن سكّان الأزقّة والأحياء الشعبية، حيث كانت تدرك أن أوكيسي يعرف هؤلاء الناس عن قرب، ذلك لأنه عاش صغره في أحد المساكن الشعبية في دبلن، وأنه مارس أقسى الأعمال وأكثرها مشقّة، فمن كنّاس في الشارع وعامل بالميناء تكوّنت خبرته الأولى بهذا العالم الذي نشأ فيه، وفي ظلّ هذه الظروف الشخصية كانت تعتقد أنه قد يفعل شيئًا هامًا للمسرح الإيرلندي


وهي مشكورة، ولكن مشكلتي في هذه المسرحية كانت أني كنت أرى الموقف الأساسي بوضوح، موقف الإضراب والإغراء للآخرين للمطالبة بالحقوق، وكنت أحسب أن الرؤية واضحة، ولكني سرعان ما مللت على طول المسرحية مع قصرها، فالمواقف كانت جدّ فضفاضة (مع جمالها) كشخص منحول يلبس قطعًا أكبر من مقاسه ثلاث أو أربع مرات!

[David Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

awesome, but meanders at points

[Daniel Silveyra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't go beyond the first act. The setting is very familiar (a romeo and juliet, except they're poor and protestant/catholic). The characters speak in a strange mixture of formal English and Irish slang, as if sometimes the author forgets himself and just reverts back to literary conversation.

Its just dull.

[Matt Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has got to be really deep on anybody's bookshelf. I picked up O'Casey's "Three Plays" because I was looking for plays and I had never read anything by him. This is a Romeo/Juliet story; and the characters switch between Irish slang and beautiful neo-shakespearean poetry. But it works, I swear.