SOURCE: "A Revaluation in the Light of the Absurd," in Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective, University of Toronto Press, 1982, pp. 84-106.

[In the following essay, Kleiman argues that O'Casey's plays express an absurdist view of life, but in a more humanistic tone than is registered in the works of Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and other playwrights associated with the "Theater of the Absurd."]

Sean O'Casey's response to the dark world of the absurdists was, quite simply, one of outrage. 'For the life of me,' he complained bitterly in 'The Bald Primaqueera,' the last article he wrote before his death, 'I can't find anything humanly absurd in any of them.'

Earlier, in an article ['Not Waiting for Godot (1956)' in Blasts and Benedictions, 1967] written especially for students of the theatre, he wrote indignantly:

Beckett? I have nothing to do with Beckett. He isn't in me; nor am I in him. I am not waiting for Godot to bring me life; I am out after life myself, even at the age I've reached. What have any of you to do with Godot? There is more life than Godot can give in the life of the least of us. That Beckett is a clever writer, and that he has written a rotting and remarkable play, there is no doubt; but his philosophy isn't my philosophy, for within him there is no hazard of hope; no desire for it; nothing in it but a lust for despair, and a crying of woe, not in a wilderness, but in a garden.

Though there are many dark moments in O'Casey, certainly in the Dublin 'Tragedies,' what his most despairing play—The Silver Tassie—makes clear is that, however he might cry 'woe' in both garden and wilderness, the world, for him, was still a place of sacrament, a place which was at once both Eden and Gethsemane. Thus, as his own plays, culminating in Red Roses for Me and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, grew more visionary and apocalyptic, he felt justified in protesting the bleak and pessimistic outlook of the younger generation of dramatists who were, to O'Casey's chagrin, obviously up-and-coming.

The sudden and almost inexplicable popularity which the new Theatre of the Absurd achieved during the last decade of O'Casey's lifetime must have perplexed him greatly. In view of his own failure to achieve the recognition that he felt his experimental plays deserved, and the more or less continuing eclipse of his own fortunes since the rejection of The Silver Tassie, the acceptance of even more wildly experimental plays in the popular and commercial theatres must have seemed totally unjust.

Indeed, we can gauge O'Casey's feeling here by comparing his final bitter lampooning of 'these Primaqueera play-wrights'—Ionesco, Rudkin, Pinter—with his fierce praise of John Arden's anti-war play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. This play, with its structural use of music and song, its richly comic, brawling characters, and its brilliant climax in the grotesque scene of the hanging skeleton and the dance of death, is strikingly like O'Casey's own expressionist theatre. Nor could O'Casey have been unaware of the multiple ironies involved when he described Arden's work as

far and away the finest play of the present day, full of power, protest, and frantic compassion, notwithstanding that, on its first presentation, it was scowled and scooted from the theatre by most of our intelligent and unintelligent drama critics. I wonder why! What dazzling Freudian id or idiom swept this rejection into them, making them reject the denunciation of war's horrors, and led them to embrace the plays which despise and hate life. ['The Bald Primaqueera,' in Blasts and Benedictions]

There is much restless energy—much wit and anger—in these two articles, one on Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the other on the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty, which, as O'Casey points out, go 'arm in arm.' And this energy derives in part from the way in which he had himself been served, throughout his lifetime, by a host of reviewers and critics, all echoing the opinion of Yeats, who rejected The Tassie out of hand. O'Casey, while not entirely blameless in the matter, at least had the good sense to recognize what was involved: 'there goes a cursed opinion again,' he told Yeats with a touch of self-mockery. And in the titles of his books, The Flying Wasp and The Green Crow, he acknowledges, with humour and courage and with a certain humility, the kind of pose vis-à-vis his detractors that he had been forced to adopt.

Despite the occasional error of fact or judgement, the value of O'Casey's own opinions on the Theatre of the Absurd lies in the energy, and even in the anger, with which they are expressed—an anger which is made palatable by wit, and an energy which remains vital and creative. Thus, O'Casey's last written words intended for publication were not just a dismissal of what he felt to be the limited and one-sided vision of the absurdists, but also a strong affirmation of his own beliefs:

Ah, to hell with the loutish lust of Primaqueera. There are still many red threads of courage, many golden threads of nobility woven into the tingling fibres of our common humanity. No one passes through life scatheless. The world has many sour noises, the body is an open target for many invisible enemies, all hurtful, some venemous, like the accursed virus which can bite deeply into flesh and mind. It is full of disappointments, and too many of us have to suffer the loss of a beloved child, a wound that aches bitterly till our time here ends. Yet, even so, each of us, one time or another, can ride a white horse, can have rings on our fingers and bells on our toes, and, if we keep our senses open to the scents, sounds, and sights all around us, we shall have music wherever we go. ['The Bald Primaqueera']

The appeal to the child's world, to the 'authority' of the nursery rhyme, makes O'Casey's point with a characteristic and utterly convincing simplicity. Rhymes and songs, music and dance were all a part of that magical affirmation of life that O'Casey wanted to see on the contemporary stage, and the older he grew, the more magic became a part of his plays in the shape, for example, of a flying cock or a trumpeting statue. Thus—despite the Tassie's rejection—O'Casey and Yeats were once more in agreement. In their later years, what they both tell us is that the proximity of death, the final cruelty in a cruel world, is not an occasion for even more metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of man's condition, but an occasion on which [as W. B. Yeats wrote in 'Sailing to Byzantium']

       Soul [must] clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
       For every tatter in its mortal dress.

It is, then, the optimistic belief that it is possible for man to transcend the absurdity of his condition which, above all, distinguishes an O'Casey play from the plays of Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd, and from the plays of those other dramatists who have been influenced by Antonin Artaud's concept of the 'theatre of cruelty.'

Yet the difference is one of emphasis and degree, rather than one of absolute contrast, for O'Casey's world contains within it the world of the absurd—that often cruel world which each of us inhabits but which can at least be laughed at, if it cannot be dealt with in any other way. And it is this 'humanly absurd' aspect of O'Casey's theatre, embodied in the song and dance, the mask, mime, farce, and slapstick, the wild tragicomic scenes in which the grotesque and the sublime mingle—in fact, all those elements which O'Casey uses to create his own kind of stage poetry—that allows us to view his plays as an unacknowledged seedbed from which grew many of the dramatic motifs and techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd. For when the curtain fell on the nearly empty stage of Juno and the Paycock, what the audience had glimpsed was the 'realistic' stage being stripped down to essentials in preparation for the curtain going up—a quarter century later—on the Theatre of the Absurd. Until recently, however, it has been O'Casey's own impassioned outcry against those 'Primaqueera' playwrights that has, to a large extent, obscured this fact.

Earlier, and in a more mellow mood, O'Casey had actually expressed a deep admiration for Beckett, even while recognizing the basic difference in their philosophies. In 'The Lark in the Clear Air Still Sings,' he wrote:

I was born to sing a different song, facing those singing the same song in many different keys—Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Greene, Eliot, Genêt, Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Camus, leaders of a host of worshipping intelligentsia—a great galaxy of darkened stars dulling the human sky. Many of these are very fine writers indeed, but to me they seem to be setting down the history of life as a Doomsday Book, though Samuel Beckett wears his rue with a difference. He is a poet, and there is a sly humor as well as music in his writing. One has but to listen to good actors speaking it within a monologue or a play to hear the music, at times to feel the deep, gloomy compassion, and to be touched by the humor in the sad recital.

Beckett, for his part, had long been an admirer of O'Casey, and this mutual admiration and respect which the two self-exiled Irishmen felt for each other speaks of a kinship of spirit and sensibility, and of an affinity which underlies their work, at least in certain clearly defined areas. In fact, long before Beckett wrote his own plays, he defined [in 'The Essential and the Incidental'] that humanly absurd element which comprises the 'essential' O'Casey:

Mr O'Casey is a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense—that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres. If Juno and the Paycock, as seems likely, is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation—'chassis.'

Beckett's interest and delight in the 'knockabout' world of O'Caseyan drama actually presages, as David Krause points out [in his Sean O'Casey, 1960], 'the knockabout nightmare world of Gogo and Didi, Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell, Krapp and Krapp, Winnie and Willie.' Moreover, Beckett's definition of O'Casey's 'chassis' as a state in which 'mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation' points to the fact that O'Casey's 'state o' chassis' is, in fact, the 'disintegrated' mode of the Absurd, with all of its tragi-comic display of metaphysical anguish. O'Casey's plays, with their knockabout, and with their basic structural metaphor of 'chassis,' suggest a relationship between the two theatres which is finally beginning to be recognized.

Thus at the end of Juno when the furniture removal men have literally taken the room apart before our very eyes and the drunken Boyle and Joxer struggle to keep from falling on the almost empty stage, the concrete image that results is a classic one which will appear again and again in the Theatre of the Absurd. Truly, 'The blinds is down'; there is no sunlight; man is surrounded by emptiness; he is alone, except for his 'parasite' or slave, who is, perhaps, his alter ego. Communication, too, is difficult, if not impossible, for words have become disjointed, their point of contact with reality uncertain:

The counthry'll have to steady itself … it's goin' … to hell … Where'r all … the chairs … gone … steady itself, Joxer … Chairs'll … have to … steady themselves … No matther … what any one may … say … Irelan' sober … is Irelan' … free.

Moreover, the ideals of Irish patriotism embodied in the fantasies of Boyle and Joxer are as insubstantial as the conjectures about Godot that preoccupy Gogo and Didi. Both worlds are absurd, but, of the two, Beckett's is the harsher, since it exists almost without reference to a saner world of basic human values, that world which Juno and Mary have, presumably, just set out to regain.

Yet the laughter which arises is, in both cases, a reaffirming laughter, for it springs from our own awareness of the discrepancy between the amount of anguish evoked and the amount which might reasonably be justified by the 'state o' chassis' that prevails. We laugh at Boyle and Joxer because, while they would enlarge the scope of their sufferings, flinging them against the grander background of Ireland's greater anguish, they are actually not even aware of the true dimensions of the 'chassis' that has invaded their lives. Boyle does not know his son is dead, nor does he realize the Juno and Mary have left him. On the contrary, all that Boyle and his 'butty' Joxer understand is that the money, with the comforts it provided, is gone, and so the last 'tanner' flung into the centre of the stage becomes the actual focus of their grief. Thus their anguish is ironically disproportionate to its cause: greater than its known cause—the loss of the legacy—less than what should be its real cause—the death of a son, the breaking up of a family, the Civil War in Ireland.

With Gogo and Didi [from Beckett's Waiting for Godot], too, we have a sense of disproportion, both grotesque and humorous, a sense that their grief is somehow less than the situation warrants—or perhaps it is greater—we cannot tell which. Godot—Man—God: a mysterious trinity, to say the least. And waiting for Godot, or, like Pozzo and Lucky, not waiting, is equally futile. All that is certain is that man's life is defined by two polarities, annihilation and salvation:

VLADIMIR. We'll hang ourselves to-morrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.

ESTRAGON. And if he comes?

VLADIMIR. We'll be saved.

Yet not even this much is certain, for the words of these two sad clowns are continually contradicted by their actions, proof enough that mind and world have come irreparably asunder. And this is the way the play ends:

VLADIMIR. Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON. Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

As in the Theatre of the Absurd, the world Boyle and Joxer struggle comically to comprehend can be summed up, finally, only by an admission of its total incomprehensibility. 'Th' whole worl',' Boyle tells Joxer conclusively, is 'in a terr … ible state o' … It is a frightening admission, but there is an undertone of self-importance, even of triumph, in Boyle's voice, for he is one of those capable (despite the odd pratfall) of standing up to such an irrational and cruel universe.

In Juno and the Paycock, as in his other plays, O'Casey reveals that he understood instinctively the Artaudian concept of a 'theatre of cruelty,' though in 'The Bald Primaqueera,' he chose instead to lampoon, in the most out-rageous way he knew how, those expressions of it which he felt, perhaps rightly, invited man to despair. A similar conclusion has been reached by Robert P. Murphy [in his 'Sean O'Casey and "The Bald Primaqueera"'], who is the first to recognize the many affinities both of dramatic motifs and dramaturgical devices between O'Casey's theatre and the theatre of Artaud. Yet Murphy does not care to speculate on why O'Casey 'seems unwilling or unable to admit that the theatre of cruelty is more than violence or the threat of violence.'

In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud specifically comments on this oversimplified notion of cruelty (such as O'Casey deliberately fastened on), when he writes:

It is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

Clearly, there are many moments in the theatre of O'Casey where such a world is glimpsed. It is even possible to catalogue (as Murphy does) the surprisingly large number of gratuitous deaths that do occur in O'Casey's plays: Minnie's, in Shadow of a Gunman, the death of Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars, the shooting of Ayamonn in Red Roses for Me, the death of Jack the lorry driver, struck down in anger by Father Domineer in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, the impending death of the paralysed Julia in the same play, and the murder of Foorawn in The Bishop's Bonfire.

But what we should also be aware of is that as many of these deaths as possible occur offstage. In fact, O'Casey rewrote the scene in Juno where Johnny is taken by the IRA so that we are not even asked to visualize the actual physical violence. Instead, the news of Johnny's death is brought by two impatient policemen and conveyed sympathetically by Mrs Madigan to Juno, whose words of grief echo those of Mrs Tancred when her own son was killed because Johnny had betrayed him. Such multiple ironies are more effective than any number of casual onstage shootings and underline the senseless cruelty of a world engaged in Civil War, a world which makes its comic ascendancy in the final scene of 'chassis.' In an O'Casey play, then, when the sky does fall—as it threatened to fall on Chicken Little—the cruelty and comedy mingle as they do in the child's magical world of the nursery fable or in the celluloid world of the cartoon.

However, while both Artaud and O'Casey insist on magic in the theatre in order to express the mysterious, unknown quality of life, the effect of O'Casey's magic is quite different. To Artaud, magic is 'brimstone,' and therefore it follows that his theatre 'emphasizes the scathes, disappointments, and suffering of life' [Murphy]. Whereas, to O'Casey: 'A play poetical to be worthy of the theatre must be able to withstand the terror of Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay, as a blue sky, or an apple tree in bloom, withstand any ugliness around or beneath them' [Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949]. In other words, O'Casey rarely offers us straight brimstone to drink, but more often a deceptively innocent-looking mixture of brimstone and treacle—a traditional nursery medicine.

Actually, it is seldom recognized nowadays that, even in O'Casey's later plays, this kind of magic, like the drum roll of Father Ned or the trumpeting of St Trinculo in The Bishop's Bonfire, heralds potential danger and the risk of disaster as well as laughter, excitement, and mystery. Though at least one critic has even managed to overstate the sense of despair in Juno, the more usual tendency now is to overlook the very real danger that lurks in O'Casey's tragi-comic 'state o' chassis' and in his often seemingly innocent Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay of life. Ironically, then, it is really only in retrospect and in the context of the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty, that Joseph Wood Krutch's comment about the final scene in Juno [in his Modern Drama] takes on its true significance: 'Like the play as a whole, this concluding scene is funny at the same time that it is bitter, hopeless, and terrible. It would, in fact, be difficult to find anywhere else in dramatic literature so extraordinary a combination of farce with loathing and a bleak despair.'

And yet it is just this extraordinary combination of farce and tragic despair that threatens in The Silver Tassie to blot out, for once, the blue sky and the blossoms of apple tree or daffodil. Nowhere else in O'Casey is the mixture of laughter and tears so painful. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition and mingling, not only of comedy and tragedy, but also of farce and tragedy treated so masterfully and so intensely. Think, for example, of Act III, where Harry's agonized and terrified awareness of 'a soft, velvety sense of distance between my fingers and the things I touch' expresses so completely the 'irreparable dissociation' of mind and body, of a world falling asunder into chaos. Here, certainly, is mystery and terror, and also a kind of magic, for there is magic in O'Casey's language as he surrounds Harry with scene of comic anarchy and refuses to let him—or us—escape from the Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay of life.

As Harry agonizes over his condition, life rollicks mindlessly on: 'Kiss in a corner; ta-ra-ra-ra, kiss in a corner!' Surgeon Maxwell flirts outrageously with Susie, while deciding, at the same time, that Sylvester must be operated on in the morning, information which sends the reluctant patient into an unwarranted paroxysm of terror. Sylvester's outraged and agonized response, as he calculates the odds for survival in this kind of universe, is wildly funny. But since in this scene he functions as a kind of comic surrogate for Harry, who is also to be operated on in the morning, there are darker and more painful undertones:

SYLVESTER. We have our hands full, Simon, to keep alive. Think of sinkin' your body to the level of a hand that, ta-ra-ra-ra, would plunge a knife into your middle, haphazard, hurryin' up to run away after a thrill from a kiss in a corner. Did you see me dizzied an' wastin' me time pumpin' ninety-nines out of me, unrecognized, quiverin' with cold an' equivocation!

SIMON. Everybody says he's a very clever fellow with the knife.

SYLVESTER. He'd gouge out your eye, saw off your arm, lift a load of vitals out of your middle, rub his hands, keep down a terrible desire to cheer lookin' at the ruin, an' say, 'Twenty-six, when you're a little better, you'll feel a new man!'

It is with a start that we realize that the kind of comic mutilations described here and portrayed, on the tragic level, by the blind Teddy and the paralysed Harry are quite similar to those which abound in the Theatre of the Absurd and Theatre of Cruelty. The absurdists, in fact, have populated their plays with blind, deaf, dumb, and crippled creatures, perhaps the most grotesque of which is the protagonist of Adamov's La grande et la petite manœuvre, who loses one limb after another each time he shows some kind of weakness, until he ends up as a basket case in a wheel-chair and is then pushed under a truck. Clearly, what these very sad clowns are trying to tell us is that the human condition is one of impotence in the face of a universe that is implacably cruel and mysterious.

It is the same theme heard in Gloucester's anguished cry [from William Shakespeare's King Lear],

        As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
        They kill us for their sport.

Yet, in the world of the absurdists, the gods are not simply unjust and inscrutable: they no longer even exist, and those who, like Mullcanny in Red Roses for Me, have made the 'grand discovery' that 'God is dead' can now draw two totally opposite conclusions.

In the face of such a meaningless universe, where the sky can fall at any moment and where there is so much suffering, one conclusion we can obviously come to is that life has no meaning. Thus, in the world depicted by the absurdists, man's intelligent and rational speech becomes, finally, an unintelligible cry. Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, for example, shows Stanley gagging on such a world when Goldberg and McCann offer it to him for his birthday:

GOLDBERG. Well, Stanny boy, what do you say, eh?

They watch. He concentrates. His head lowers, his chin draws into his chest, he crouches.

STANLEY. Ug-gughh … uh-gughh …

MCCANN. What's your opinion, sir?

STANLEY. Caaahhh … caaahhh …

The closest we come to this kind of huddled and despairing cry in the theatre of O'Casey is in Harry's bitter denial, 'Napoo!' ('Vanished! lost! done! finished!'), a denial of home and friend and the girl he loves—all now equally meaningless. If the word was not already becoming obsolete when O'Casey used it, he must nevertheless have chosen it for the quality of its sound. For its power, in the context of the Theatre of the Absurd, also derives, perhaps coincidentally, from its very strangeness, its very unintelligibility. By contrast, the anguished crying of Ayamonn's name, which occurs several times throughout the final act of Red Roses for Me, functions on both a realistic and expressionist level to present a world which, in its Eastertime context, is simultaneously absurd and divine.

Here, then, is the other conclusion that we can come to in a meaningless universe: man must create his own meaning, must continually make his own affirmations. This task is not an easy one, and it comes as no surprise to discover that the anguish of the absurdists is often reflected in their lives, as well as in their plays. Certainly this is true of Ionesco, Adamov, and Genêt, though the example of Artaud, himself, with his visions and his history of mental breakdown, is the most extreme. Significantly, however, it is in O'Casey's plays, rather than in the plays of the absurdists, that we can detect something of Artaud's messianic vision.

Somewhat paradoxically, Artaud believed, as did O'Casey, that the true theatrical experience was a religious one, that the experience of the theatre was a communion involving all its participants, and that to base the drama in myth and ritual was to root it in life itself. Such plays as The Silver Tassie and Red Roses for Me are particularly good illustrations of what Artaud meant when he wrote: 'To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theater':

Furthermore, when we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. [The Theater and Its Double]

The ultimately unbearable intensity of Artaud's artistic vision is summed up by the metaphor of fire. Whereas, in O'Casey, it is not so much the metaphor of fire, as of light—from the 'red glare' illuminating the darkness in Act II of The Silver Tassie to the 'little flower of light' that the lamplighter carries in Red Roses for Me—which best expresses the range and intensity of O'Casey's vision.

And it is somewhere between the burning genius of Artaud and the brilliant illumination of O'Casey's genius that we glimpse the countenance of Beckett as Martin Esslin [in his The Theatre of the Absurd, 1969] describes him, 'the most balanced and serene of men.' Of all the absurdists, it is Beckett who allows us to catch almost infinitesimal glimmers of hope in the midst of darkest despair: the 'four or five leaves' that have suddenly appeared on the tree in the second act of Godot, for instance, or the fact that, after innumerable pratfalls, Gogo and Didi are standing miraculously upright at the final curtain—and Gogo has even managed to pull up his trousers!

To evoke laughter in the face of despair and to make poetry out of the cruelty of the human condition is a considerable achievement. For O'Casey, however, it was clearly not enough. And if the ecstatic joy which transforms the hearts of the Dublin men and women in the visionary third act of Red Roses for Me occurs only once, there are still many times in the theatre of O'Casey where the possibility of such a transfigured world is glimpsed. For it is just where his vision is darkest and the irony most intense that O'Casey's characters usually choose to affirm life in whatever way they can.

Even in The Silver Tassie, the darkest of all O'Casey's plays, Harry, the grotesque 'half-baked Lazarus,' is finally able to put his wits together long enough to make sense out of nonsense: 'The Lord hath given and man hath taken away!' Of course, in the context of blind man and wheel-chair victim, Harry's previous resolve, 'What's in front we'll face like men!'—as its deliberately trite and commonplace phrasing confirms—seems as ironic and futile as any of the attempts at affirmation made by Gogo and Didi. In fact, it is really only in the final movement of Harry and Teddy onstage, more than in their speech, that we can discern the more positive direction that the O'Casey play takes. For, in the last two acts of The Tassie, the garden on the edge of the 'wilderness' exists, for the most part, outside the consciousness of the characters in the play. Or, at any rate, the garden exists on the very periphery of consciousness (like the calm sea in Endgame), related only tangentially to the world of the absurd that dominates the stage. Thus, as blind man and cripple move into the garden prior to going offstage altogether, this purposeful movement, in contrast to the immobility of Gogo and Didi, or Hamm and Clov, at their play's end, must be seen as some kind of rather less ambiguous affirmation.

In Endgame, moreover, the actions of Hamm and Clov finally negate the positive direction in which the play, even if only by means of its often lyrical dialogue, is attempting to move. Nagg's generosity to Nell, for example, is continually thwarted by Hamm's orders, which Clov faithfully carries out: stuffed in ash-cans, Nagg and Nell cannot move close enough together to kiss, or to scratch each other's backs. For Hamm, in his misery, is destructive and has been responsible for the deaths of the other survivors. In fact his cruelty to others is appalling. But since it springs directly from the terrible way in which a cruel and senseless universe has treated him, it is, like Harry Heegan's cruelty, easily understandable.

Yet, while Hamm controls the others, he is impotent: blind and paralyzed, wheeled about in an armchair with castors, he calls petulantly for his pain-killer and his catheter. For he is another of the maimed creatures of the Absurd whose multiple disabilities embody a gaping spiritual defect. Nor is there any cure for what is simply part of the human condition. As Hamm reminds Clov: 'use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!'

With Hamm, despair continually extinguishes hope, even as it continually points to the existence of that cruel and absurd universe from which man so longs to escape. The image of Hamm in his wheelchair, then, is one of the most basic images of the Absurd: man reduced to 'ham,' to the purely animal and physical, by means of a despair which overwhelms and finally annihilates him. The image is becoming a familiar one in our time, as it sums up all the metaphysical anguish of twentieth-century man in a mechanized world. Impotent, blind, crippled, without faith or hope, unable any longer to walk upright, he lashes out angrily at whatever crosses his path.

And behind the figure of Hamm, if we look closely, is the figure of another wheelchair victim—Harry Heegan—wheeling himself crazily about the stage, pursuing, running down and grappling with whatever he thinks to be the cause of his anguish, and, finally, calling out, both to man and God, for the misery to cease. And though the torment can never cease for Harry Heegan, it does lessen, partly because he has plumbed the limits of despair and can go no further, but also because, by an act of faith or will, he chooses to move into the garden—beyond the Absurd.

It is these limits which both the Theatre of O'Casey and the Theatre of the Absurd continually re-examine and redefine. But, while 'The blinds is down' for Captain Boyle and his 'butty' Joxer, the darkness is not nearly so intense as that which ends Hamm's apocalyptic day: 'You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.' Hamm's words are a poignant and lyrical description of one aspect of the human condition, but the advice would never be followed by an O'Casey character simply because—with such rare exceptions as Nora Clitheroe and Harry Heegan—an O'Casey character never given in, for long, to despair.

O'Casey's relationship to the Theatre of the Absurd, made apparent first of all by his use of such key structural images as the 'state o' chassis' and man in a wheelchair, is also clearly evident in the particular way he uses language. The 'irreparable dissociation' of mind and world that puzzles and amazes Boyle and terrifies Harry finds concrete expression, not only in disintegrating stage sets, in the splitting apart of families, in violent quarrels, in blind and crippled bodies, in sudden, gratuitous deaths, but also, above all, in the violent rending apart of language itself, a convulsion that can result, however, in a new world of meaning rising out of the old. Accordingly, by the end of Red Roses for Me, even Brennan's ridiculous cliché, 'Money's the root of all evil,' is forced to impart its own unexpected truth. And what is revealed is that to choose Brennan's viewing of life—or, worse still, the Inspector's—is to choose to live in a world of cliché and absurdity. Such an ironic use of the cliché is a characteristic device of O'Casey's from the early plays onward. In Juno and the Paycock, for example, the hackneyed slogan 'a principle's a principle' echoes throughout the play, but before it is over the actions of the various characters have exposed, and rejected, the hollowness of a world which tries to function according to completely arbitrary and inhuman principles.

Similarly, in The Bald Prima Donna, Ionesco uses cliché to record the pettiness, meanness, viciousness—and, finally, the absurdity—of the world his characters inhabit. But, again, the difference between the two theatres is one of degree. For Ionesco, unlike O'Casey, often makes his characters speak nothing but cliché, so that, in effect, a process of reductio ad absurdum is constantly at work. Is it any wonder, then, that Ionesco's plays evoked the charge that language is in the process of being broken down and stripped of meaning altogether? [In a footnote, Kleiman refers the reader to Kenneth Tynan's 'Ionesco, Man of Destiny?' (1958).] Yet Ionesco denied that he felt language had become meaningless: 'The very fact of writing and presenting plays is surely incompatible with such a view. I simply hold that it is difficult to make oneself understood, not absolutely impossible' [Ionesco, 'A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role' (1958)].

Ionesco's reply makes clear that the difficulty of communicating new ideas in a language which has become riddled with clichés, truisms, and the slogans of outworn ideologies is, of course, basically the same for any writer. But what links O'Casey ahead to Ionesco and the Absurdists, rather than back to Toller and the Expressionists, is the fact that O'Casey is not afraid to satirize verbal formulas—to disintegrate language along with the stage sets—since he knows that, in the explosion which follows, a lot of false beliefs and prejudices will be swept away. Thus, while the basic device which O'Casey uses to force language to communicate again is the old, traditional one of dramatic irony, he often pushes it to an extreme which creates a new context: one which can replace walls with the limitless perspective of the universe.

In this universe stumble characters who reveal, by the emptiness of their nonsensical conversations, their mental and spiritual disabilities. Such characters, with their use of obscure and unpronounceable names or Latin tags—'Terra Del Fooaygeeans,' 'os coccyges'—even manage to sound like fugitives on their way from the expressionist theatre of O'Casey to the Theatre of the Absurd. However, while these various kinds of 'talkathons'—so characteristic of both theatres—usually sound quite funny and seem harmless enough, they can at times be harmful, and, at worst, downright dangerous. Not only do they signify the 'blindness' and 'impotence' of certain characters, but they can also signify a willingness to blind and castrate others, if not to destroy them completely. For example, the Professor in Ionesco's The Lesson and McCann and Goldberg in Pinter's The Birthday Party destroy their victims, first of all, by talk. And the final disastrous result of all this empty and dangerous talk is the realization onstage of a dark and crippled world, a world which can be summed up in the images of blind man and wheelchair victim.

Disintegrated language, then, itself becomes one of the most basic images of a world which continually threatens us with its unintelligibility. And cliché, platitude, political slogans, mispronounced words, or words from dead or foreign languages are but a few of the many modes of its disintegration which O'Casey shares with the absurdists. Yet, rather than merely acknowledging and confronting such an unintelligible universe, O'Casey actively persists in his attempts to find new ways of establishing meaning. In Act III of The Tassie, to take a more complex example, the extremely intricate effect of the repetition of the name 'Sister Peter Alcantara' five times in seven lines of dialogue comes from the interaction of words and rhythm:

MRS HEEGAN. Sister Peter Alcantara said we might come up, Nurse.

MRS FORAN. (loftily) Sister Peter Alcantara's authority ought to be good enough, I think.

MRS HEEGAN. Sister Peter Alcantara said a visit might buck him up a bit.

MRS FORAN. Sister Peter Alcantara knows the responsibility she'd incur by keeping a wife from her husband and a mother from her son.

SUSIE. Sister Peter Alcantara hasn't got to nurse him.

This apparently senseless and farcical repetition of a name is the kind of repetition that frequently occurs in the dialogue of Absurd plays. It is another one of the many devices which signal that the characters are having difficulty in communicating. And it occurs as a prelude to the 'Disgraceful … commotion'—the 'state o' chassis'—into which the visiting scene collapses. Thus, despite the assurances, the repeated affirmation in the appeal to the authority of a representative of the Church, the dissonant note struck by Susie's reply has been carried all along in the rhythmical drumbeat of the name in which the militant power of the Church itself is felt. In the rhythms of the name—Sís-têr Pé-têr Ál-cân-tá-râ—there is more of O'Casey's Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay of life with its attendant dangers. Here, the rhythms should remind us that it is the powerful authority of the Church militant that has countenanced the war in which Harry has been crippled and Teddy blinded. For the characters onstage, however, the language communicates on only the most elementary level. And the constant repetitions, like those in a child's primer (or the English language primer out of which Ionesco constructed The Bald Prima Donna), calls attention to this fact.

Yet it is out of our awareness of the disintegration of their language and the explosion of laughter that results from their absurdity that O'Casey manages to make sense. In other words, by using one of the disintegrated fragments of language, in this case, the rhythms and tonal qualities of the words themselves, O'Casey forces language to communicate again. And what we should hear in the persistent repetition of the name, 'Sister Peter Alcantara'—and what the director should perhaps let us hear in the wings—is the insistent drumbeat of war.

Finally, the complex use O'Casey makes of dialect illustrates even more clearly the artifice that is involved in creating 'humanly absurd' characters whose speech is supposedly a faithful transcript of life. Even in the early plays, as J. A. Snowden comments [in 'Dialect in the Plays of Sean O'Casey' (1972)], O'Casey 'shows a preoccupation with language and an obvious belief in its power to transform reality.' By the time he is writing Red Roses, O'Casey is using dialect (or the absence of dialect) for symbolic purposes, to convey a mood or attitude or a metaphysical dimension of character. For example, during the religious dissension in Act II, Brennan, who usually speaks like a Dubliner, lapses into a 'semi-Ulster' dialect. Similarly, Foster and Dowzard speak in a strong Ulster dialect—so characteristic of the extreme Orange faction—though there is no indication in the text that they come from anywhere else but Dublin. What O'Casey is doing, then, is using the dialect to indicate an attitude of extreme fanaticism where religious matters are concerned, an attitude which is not confined to Ulster, but which can be found anywhere. Since the dialect is broken apart, as it were, from its normal referent and used satirically and symbolically, it provides still another instance of language being used in the disintegrated mode of the Absurd.

The apparent contradiction which underlies the fact that such a disintegration of language has resulted in some of the most vital of contemporary theatre, together with dialogue that is fresh and new and really very exciting, is a contradiction which can be resolved by recognizing that disintegrating language, like laughter itself, is a liberating process. O'Casey seems to have realized this instinctively and was never averse to playing exuberantly with language for fear it might drop and break. On the contrary, especially in his persona of the raucous Green Crow, he became quite vocal in his demands for a liberated theatre, one in which there is the freedom to mix styles and modes, prose and verse, dialects and rhetorical devices with what may look at first like a kind of gay abandon. What we need to be aware of, however, in evaluating O'Casey's apparent 'excesses' of language, is that there may be a legitimate dramatic purpose behind his use of sentimental or melodramatic cliché, or behind his use of what has been called a 'pseudo-poetic' rhetoric. And that purpose, as well as his means of realizing it onstage, can often be made clear in the light of the Absurd.

While some of O'Casey's language (like some of his stage sets) shows a remarkable inclination to fly apart, his stage-craft, by contrast, shows a remarkable cohesiveness. It is, in fact, his skilful use of all the elements of theatre, particularly in his two most visionary plays, that often allows him to build a series of concrete symbolic images, all closely integrated, which, if properly realized onstage, will unify what otherwise can wrongly appear as a loosely knit and disparate structure.

Moreover, the way in which O'Casey uses the concrete 'physical' aspects of his theatre—dance, mime and mask, music, lighting, and scenery—bears a striking resemblance to the way in which the exponents of the Theatre of Cruelty have made use of Artaud's concept of mise en scène. [In a footnote Kleiman elaborates: 'By mise en scène Artaud means "everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words … This language created for the senses must from the outset be concerned with satisfying them. This does not prevent it from developing later its full intellectual effect on all possible levels and in every direction. But it permits the substitution, for the poetry of language, of a poetry in space which will be resolved in precisely the domain which does not belong strictly to words"' (Artaud, The Theater and Its Double).] This relationship can be discerned, for instance, in the various transformation scenes and in the dances of life—or death—found throughout the O'Casey canon, each of which can be described as an 'Artaudian replacement of words by another dramatic language' [Murphy]. Though in the final analysis, O'Casey's language is never really devaluated, in this kind of 'speech before words' the appeal is clearly to the senses and cannot be fully articulated by the dialogue alone.

Thus, in his own attempts to break the bonds of the realistic stage, O'Casey was actually translating into practical stagecraft, even earlier than 1928, a great many of the less extreme demands that Artaud was to formulate, with messianic zeal, a decade later. Ironically, though O'Casey was to make his demands clearly enough and in a way which linked his theatre to the traditions of the past—to the 'big life and … gorgeous time' that the theatre had 'when the Trade Guilds went about in their wagons doing the Mystery and the Morality Plays' [O'Casey, 'Behind the Curtained World (1942),' in Blasts and Benedictions], and to the exuberance and freedom of the Elizabethan stage—the true nature of his experimental drama was constantly obscured by the criticism (often sectarian and non-literary) which assailed it.

But if we use Ionesco's articulate and far-reaching claims for the contemporary avant-garde theatre as a kind of lens to view, in retrospect, the plays of Sean O'Casey, what we confirm is how surprisingly alike, in their use of certain elements of stagecraft, the two theatres are:

Everything is permitted in the theatre: to bring characters to life, but also to materialize states of anxiety, inner presences. It is thus not only permitted, but advisable, to make the properties join in the action, to make objects live, to animate the décor, to make symbols concrete. Just as words are continued by gesture, action, mime, which, at the moment when words become inadequate, take their place, the material elements of the stage can in turn further intensify these. [Esslin]

This kind of theatre, where mise en scène is itself the essence of the drama, has been described as 'concretized poetic images in associative sequence,' a concept which is an elaboration of Artaud's own term, 'poetry in space.' What better way could one describe the total effect of, say, Act II of The Silver Tassie or Act III of Red Roses? Certainly what unifies these two acts, when plot and character apparently become fluid and disunified (perhaps we should say 'disintegrated'), is the highly formal structure that unifies poetry.

Thinking of Absurd plays as 'poems,' Esslin calls attention [in his Reflections] to the symmetry of Acts I and II of Waiting for Godot and 'the rigid ritual structure of The Blacks.' Clearly, the formal and dramatic structure of The Tassie also depends upon the symmetry of the ritual: the symmetrical 'elevations' both of 'chalice' and 'host,' the 'host' being Harry in Act I, the Croucher in Act II. While in Red Roses, as we have seen, the underlying formal principle, made evident by its Easter setting, is that of the miracle or passion play.

The inclusion, once again, in the theatre of such formal elements as myth and ritual has naturally tended to acquire a certain aura of respectability: whereas the inclusion of such apparently disparate elements as those drawn from the circus, the ballet, the mime show, or the music hall—at least until the advent of the absurdists—has not. And yet the effect of adding these magical elements to a basically realistic theatre, as O'Casey was apparently aware, is to give more scope to the expression of the absurd side of man's nature. The portrayal which results is often a grotesque, yet by taking into full account the basest aspect of our humanity, and by liberating us from it by laughter, such a portrayal also has the capacity for showing forth the sublime. Characters, scenes, and images which are grotesque are, in fact, one of O'Casey's means of realizing onstage the most complete dimensions of man's life and of the world he inhabits.

For O'Casey's artistic vision saw how the grotesque images of the Expressionists could be used in a new way: one in which elements of farce, as an expression and admission of the absurd side of our nature, can heighten, as well as shatter, our sense of the tragic, the noble or the divine. Thus, in Red Roses, a play whose affinities with the Absurd derive directly from O'Casey's own 'homemade' expressionism, he fully acknowledges, in Ayamonn's 'hunchbacked' form, our bondage in an unintelligible world in order to show us why such a world must somehow be translated.

From early plays to late, O'Casey's tragi-comic vision naturally found expression in a multiplicity of grotesque and absurd images: from Bessie's dishevelled head (framed in a tenement window), crying, 'Choke th' chicken,' to the mysteriously appearing statue in Figuro in the Night. Yet, of all these images, it is one from Red Roses for Me, 'the severed head of Dunn-Bo speaking out of the darkness,' which best sums up that quality of O'Casey's work that has remained without a proper critical context or vocabulary to explicate it. Labelled simply as 'a piece of near-expressionist symbolism, the severed head has been reduced to 'atmosphere' with something like the melodramatic effect of the graveyard scene in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, where Moritz 'comes stomping over the graves, his head under his arm.' In fact this part of the transformation scene has consistently been dramatized in a way which topples the act, and, frequently, much of the play into bathos and sentimentality. As well as being bathed in 'a patch of supernatural light descending from the sky like a benediction, the head of Dunn-Bo demands to be realized onstage in a way which does not understate its relationship to the 'severed' heads of Nagg and Nell as they come popping up out of the ashcans in Endgame, or the head of Winnie resting atop the mound of earth in Happy Days.

However, it is out of this absurd world (as he modulates through the grotesque on the way to the sublime) that O'Casey, unlike Beckett, creates onstage a new world of meaning. Thus the severed head of Dunn-Bo, contrary to what we would expect, does not prophesy, except by speaking in the apparently meaningless cliché of political rhetoric—'A step ahead for us today: another one for you tomorrow'—and so calls into doubt its own role as a symbol of the godhead. Here is Ayamonn apparently 'talking' himself to his death, foolishly giving his life, as the severed head so mockingly implies, for the ideals he believes in. Yet, the next moment, moving beyond parody, the head appears magical, prophetic, and divine as Ayamonn's empty rhetoric is replaced by 'poetry in space,' poetry made concrete by the miraculous transformation of the world about him. For the ecstatic dance of life in which Ayamonn and Finnoola now join is the celebration of a world which is no longer absurd.

But it is when we are without such a vision that life can quickly become a macabre dance of death: Dowzard dancing wildly about as he shouts, 'Th' dhrum, th' dhrum, th' Protestant dhrum!', or Foster, 'a dancing dervish,' trampling on Ayamonn's cross of daffodils; or Harry in his wheelchair crying, 'Trumpets and drum begin!… Dance and dance and dance', as he 'Whirls round … to the beat of the tune.' In each case the dancing is a maimed and crippled rite, a St Vitus dance of pained, spasmodic movements, the grotesque convulsions of those who are possessed, not by a sense of love and fellowship, but by an agonizing hatred of their fellow man.

Not so surprisingly, then, while both visionary plays struggle to transcend despair, it is in the more anguished Tassie, when Harry, despite his 'agony,' is able to move into the garden, that the absurd world remains behind to dominate the stage. Whereas, it is in Red Roses (The Tassie's 'mirror twin'), when Foster and Dowzard flee in terror out of the garden taking with them their absurd world of buffoonery and knockabout, that Ayamonn's vision, caught in the harmony of song, presents, as the curtain falls, a final image of discordia concors.

What distinguishes O'Casey's vision from that of either the Expressionists or the Absurdists is this unerring ability to harmonize discords, to integrate successfully both thematically and in terms of stagecraft, all the wildly disintegrating elements of the world in which we live. Unlike Ernst Toller, who, in Transfiguration, could not control the effect of farce in the dance of death with the girl skeleton 'outraged' by war, O'Casey was able to mingle the absurd and the tragic—in the 'graveyard' scene in Act II of The Tassie, for example—to heighten and make credible his overall artistic purpose. But the effect of farce mingling with tragedy was one that audiences in the late twenties were almost completely unprepared for, as the rejection of The Tassie and the ensuing controversy made plain.

When an Expressionist skeleton appears in a dance of death on an English stage just prior to the sixties, however, a change has taken place, both in the play and in the audience. The play is John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance—that one 'Primaqueera' play which O'Casey exempted from his wholesale condemnation because, undoubtedly, he recognized in it an artistic vision akin to his own. Much of the power of the Arden play comes, in fact, from his use of the grotesque: Serjeant Musgrave expresses his despair and rage and his desire for revenge in a macabre dance of death, performed, appropriately enough, to the warlike sound of trumpet and drum. The point of the scene is underlined by having the hanging, dancing skeleton unveiled as the 'flag' beneath which Serjeant Musgrave himself dances, 'his face contorted with demoniac fury.' The skeleton is that of a comrade killed senselessly in a guerilla-type encounter and brought back to his home town in the box that the Serjeant and the other deserters have been carrying throughout the play. Thus the skeleton has not been brought in as a kind of portable 'atmosphere' but has been skilfully integrated into the narrative and dramatic structure. In this way, Arden's grotesque image of the dance of death now seems to bear a more direct relationship to O'Casey's 'homemade' expressionism—O'Casey's own 'poetry in space'—than it does to the Expressionist stage.

Significantly, it is in the work of such a playwright as Arden that Martin Esslin sees most clearly the direction in which contemporary drama should develop. In Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Esslin discerns the bringing together of those elements of fable, folksong, and picaresque incident that are characteristic of Brecht's theatre with 'the obsessiveness, the nightmarish psychological reality of the Theatre of the Absurd—without ever leaving the plane of external realism' [Reflections]. Moreover, it is these two wings of the avant-grade—the objective, realistic, socially committed epic theatre of Brecht and the subjective, poetic, grotesque drama of the absurdists—that Esslin credits with rescuing the theatre from the bonds of the realistic stage:

It is the achievement of the Absurdists together with the Brechtians to have brought the theatre back to the full richness of its traditional vocabulary, to have freed it from the narrow restrictionism of pretending to be reality observed through a missing fourth wall, which … banished all the delicious world of the dreamlike, the supernatural, and its stage machinery from the theatre.

The description of the theatre of the future which Esslin gives sounds so much like O'Casey's theatre that it is sometimes difficult to understand why the true nature of O'Casey's innovative craftsmanship—developing out of Expressionism and moving towards the Theatre of the Absurd—has so long gone unrecognized. And yet a theatre which is ahead of its time can only wait patiently—or impatiently, as O'Casey did—for the times to catch up to it.

With a start we realize that all those wild and magical elements for which O'Casey's plays have long been criticized have nevertheless been accepted in the 'no-holds-barred' theatre of the newer and more popular avant-garde. Their dark vision, too, has held the stage to the exclusion of O'Casey's brighter one, yet, ironically, when O'Casey's own vision was darkest—in The Tassie—it was rejected. And though the proportion of nightmare and obsession in the later O'Casey lessens, as does the degree of tragedy, these qualities, which dominate in the tortured characters of the absurdists, have never been lacking in O'Casey's theatre: from the tap-tapping on the wall in Shadow of a Gunman; through the weird prophesies of Bessie Burgess in The Plough, the despairing Black Mass of the Croucher, the agonizing danse macabre of Harry in his wheelchair, the severed head of Dunn-Bo speaking out of the darkness; and, finally, in Foster's and Dowzard's diabolical dance of death.

Part of the excitement in O'Casey's theatre depends, not only upon such grotesque scenes and characters—at times closely related to the predominantly black magic, or 'brimstone,' of the Artaudian universe—but also upon the kinds of magical transformations that a no-holds-barred theatre is free to encourage. While O'Casey lampooned Ionesco for changing people into rhinoceroses, his own fanciful creation, the cock of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, is obviously a similar kind of magical stage device. Then, too, the shock effect which Amos Kenan generates in The Lion, as the baby who is building a wall of wooden blocks, brusquely changes into a general overseeing a battle and then into a building magnate, is not entirely unlike the startling effects more realistically generated by O'Casey as football hero changes to soldier, soldier to Croucher, later to the dehumanized, anonymous soldier worshipping the gun; and, finally, to wheelchair victim. In O'Casey, though many of these transformations verge on the supernatural, they have a concreteness and a reality which is too often absent from the more abstract dreamlike representations of either the Expressionist stage or the stage of the Absurd.

Throughout O'Casey's constantly changing dramatic world there is, nevertheless, an underlying sense of permanence and reality which is borne out in the context of three O'Casey plays—The Tassie, Red Roses, and The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe—written over a period of more than thirty years. In these plays one image undergoes several startling transformations to suggest, not only the changing mood and tempo, but also the vast range and harmony of O'Casey's artistic vision. Thus that agonizingly bitter-'sweet chariot' of which Harry Heegan sings is transformed, by the power of Ayamonn's vision, to a bronze 'chariot … forging forward to th' battle-front,' until at last it becomes 'a turf creel-cart pulled by a donkey,' as a character to whom O'Casey gives his own name, Sean, 'unable to resist the humour of it … lilts':

       Sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home,
       Swe-et char-i-o-t, comin' for to carry me home!

From the tragi-comic and grotesque, through the lyrical and sublime, O'Casey comes to rest in a gently comic viewing of man. With all his ridiculous pretensions and his vices and with all his noisy quarrelsomeness, there is still something noble and divine in man which allows him to respond gratefully to life, as Lord Leslieson does to the hospitable Martha of Kylenamoe, 'Thank you, thank you, an' God save you and your good man kindly, too.' Spoken after a quarrel over nothing—in a play which, like the plays of the absurdists, gives no plot and no external motivation for its characters—these words go beyond the absurd to affirm life in a way that, for a writer who was an avowed atheist in his eightieth year, is a truly astonishing achievement.

And the fullest expression of this achievement is, clearly, the colourful host of the characters themselves, as—at the sound of trumpet and drum—they come dancing across O'Casey's Bridge of Vision to take their place amidst all the gorgeous Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay of life.