Sean O’Casey and the Irish Drama (1934)

Abstract

At the three giants of the new English-speaking theatre, Shaw was released at last from the world of fools to which he played a schoolmaster in vain, and O’Neill, worn down to the semi-paralysed skeleton of the fine figure of a man we knew, merely lingered to remind us that Fate is the ironist he always claimed it was. Only O’Casey is left us from the triumvirate of our theatre, and there is much comfort in the realization that his last play Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, published in 1949, had more dramatic sinew and vitality than anything written by him since The Plough and the Stars a quarter of a century ago. It is no small irony, however, that a theatre very much in need of a breath of greatness is ill at ease whenever the wind blows from the English countryside where Ireland’s greatest surviving writer lives in exile. Virtually an exile from the English-speaking theatre as well, O’Casey proudly waits to be invited into the shabby temples of Broadway and London’s West End, and he signals to us with play after play that we can have him solely on his own terms. Such independence being most unusual, and also extremely disconcerting when money – money for stage productions – is involved, he enters only the portals of theatrical enterprises poor enough to be able to afford integrity.

This essay, here published for the first time, was Professor Dobree’s lecture at the 1934 Malvern Festival, where it preceded a performance of The Moon in the Yellow River.