Ever a Fighter: The Drums of Father Ned (1960)

Abstract

‘I was ever a fighter’, wrote Browning in Prospice, and the Sean O’Casey of the Autobiographies might say the same. So might the dramatist: his dramas cover the Irish fight for freedom; Eire’s subsequent civil conflict; the first Great War; Fascism and Communism in armed opposition; the second Great War; strike action in Ireland. He has missed no contemporary opportunity, and where actual fighting is not the issue its place is taken by the many richly developed seriocomic theological, social and scientific arguments that enliven his dramatic world. Nor is it strange that he should also have composed our most comprehensive dramatic document on peace. Peace and conflict are interdependent; a true diagnosis of peace will expose the dominant forces battling beneath its apparent calm; and this is just what O’Casey did in Within the Gates, patterning out the life of peace-time London in a series of ritual-conflicts.