Sean O’Casey as a Socialist Artist (1966)

Abstract

There has been little agreement among critics when they try to define what is Sean O’Casey’s fundamental position or method in his first four full-length plays, those written for the Abbey Theatre. Yet unless the social focus of these works is thoroughly grasped, his later development and indeed his whole creative achievement remain blurred and cannot be truly evaluated. His attitude has often been described as pacifist and anti-heroic (Krause), or as showing the individual lost and crushed, ‘overshadowed by the conflict of impersonal forces, of which he is more and more the victim’ (R. Peacock). The plays lack unified or lasting effect: ‘to this day I do not know just where the author’s sympathies lie’ (J. W. Krutch); they suffer from misplaced comedy and so break down into naturalistic caricature, ‘a particularly degenerate art’ (R. Williams); they are mere photographic slices of life ‘in the strictest and most literal sense of the term’ (Malone).