SOURCE: "Sean O'Casey," in Sean O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Kilroy, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, pp. 53-60.

[An English critic and novelist, Williams was highly acclaimed for his neo-Marxist studies of literature, culture, and society. Some of his best-known works include The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), and Marxism and Literature (1977). In the following excerpt, originally published in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968), Williams contends that O'Casey's dramas primarily exploit the ironic contrast between the violence and desolation of life in Dublin and the carefree language of its working-class residents.]

Irish history had broken into revolution, a war of liberation and civil war by the time O'Casey began to write for the Abbey Theatre. His first acted play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) is at once a response to this experience of violence and, in its way, a bitter postscript to Synge's Playboy of the Western World. It is set in the crowded overflowing life of a Dublin tenement house, which is O'Casey's major early setting. The Irish drama, in this sense, has come to town. The turbulent history through which Ireland had been living breaks into these tenements. As a direct action it is on the streets, and the people crowded in the houses react to it, in essential ways, as if it were an action beyond and outside them. This viewpoint determines most of O'Casey's early drama.

The Shadow of a Gunman is in this sense exact. It is the shadow that falls across a quite other life, but also it is the Playboy's action of a false hero: the frightened sentimental poet Davoren who is built up, by gossip and surmise, into a gunman's reputation:

And what danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?

It is the contrast between the bitter action of the history and a feckless deceiving and self-deceiving talk that O'Casey uses as his dramatic point. Men are killed elsewhere, but within the tenement:

No wonder this unfortunate country is as it is for you can't depend upon the word of a single individual in it.

The only victim within the play is the girl Minnie:

DAVOREN…. I'm sure she is a good girl, and I believe she is a brave girl.

SEUMAS. A Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement! You think a lot about her simply because she thinks a lot about you, an' she thinks a lot about you because she looks upon you as a hero—a kind o' Paris … she'd give the worl' and all to be gaddin' about with a gunman.

It is Minnie who is killed, after a raid on the house; found hiding arms because she believes in Davoren. The bitterness is carried right through, in that Davoren, after her death, can react only in the stereotyped "poetry" which has been his pretence and his reality:

        Ah me, alas! Pain, pain, pain ever, for ever!

With real killing in the streets, the poverty and the pretence cross to make new inadvertent victims.

This kind of irony, in O'Casey, is very difficult to follow through. The central language of Shadow of a Gunman is bare and taut; it is there, in reality, in the crowded life, as a tension with the endless romanticizing, boasting, sentimentality; or, again characteristically, with the simple misuse of language by the uneducated, which O'Casey always emphasizes, as here in Gallogher's letter:

ventures to say that he thinks he has made out a Primmy Fashy case.

It is done from the inside, this tenement life, but with an eye on the audience, on external and "educated" reactions. O'Casey moves from this kind of caricature to a simpler excited naturalism—the endless overflowing talk:

They didn't leave a thing in the kitchen that they didn't flitter about the floor …

It is a dramatist speaking at once from inside and outside this rush of life; in The Shadow of a Gunman with genuine uncertainty, and using the tension of the farcical and the terrible.

Juno and the Paycock, which followed in 1924, is in the same structure of feeling. The life is seen as farce, with death cutting across it. This can be rationalized, as in O'Casey's late description of Shadow of a Gunman, as expressing "the bewilderment and horror at one section of the community trying to murder and kill the other." But this is never, really, what the plays show. What is there is a feckless, rush, endlessly evading and posturing, while through it one or two figures—mainly women—take the eventual burden of reality. In Juno and the Paycock the dominant action is the talk of Boyle and Joxer: idle talk, with a continual play at importance: the false colours of poverty, which has gone beyond being faced and which is now the endless, stumbling, engaging spin of fantasy. The formal plot is rooted in this, as it might have been in Synge: the false expectation of a legacy, which will alter this world. But what comes, in the real action, is the killing from outside: first Tancred, the Republican fighter, and then Johnny, the son of the house, who betrayed him. The bereaved mothers in each case, and in the same words, call:

Take away our hearts o' stone, an' give us hearts o' flesh! Take away this murdherin' hate, an' give us Thine own eternal love!

It is a deep, convincing, unconnected cry. It is what the mothers feel, in the terrible disturbance of the fighting. But what the play shows is not the "hearts of stone"; it is counterpointing and overriding these moments of intense suffering, the endless, bibulous, blathering talk.

This is, of course, an authentic structure, but it is not that which is usually presented. It is always difficult to speak from outside so intense and self-conscious a culture, but in the end we are bound to notice, as a continuing and determining fact, how little respect, except in the grand gestures, the Irish drama had for the Irish people. It was different when the people were remote and traditional, as in Riders to the Sea. But already what comes through the surface warmth of The Playboy of the Western World is a deeply resigned contempt—a contempt which then allows amusement—for these deprived, fantasy-ridden talkers. Synge got near this real theme, and O'Casey is continuously dramatically aware of it. But it is a very difficult emotion to control: an uneasy separation and exile, from within the heart of the talk. And because this is so, this people's dramatist writing for what was said to be a people's theatre at the crisis of this people's history, is in a deep sense mocking it at the very moment when it moves him. The feelings of the fighters, in that real history, are not dramatically engaged at all; all we see and hear is the flag, the gesture, the rhetoric. The need and the oppression are silent, or at best oblique in some consequent action. What is active and vociferous is a confusion: the victims trapped in their tenements and abusing or flattering each other. What can be said by the mother, authentically, is

Take away this murdhering hate

—a reaction to the fact of a dead son, in whatever cause. But what is primarily and finally said is Boyle's

The whole worl's in a terrible state of chassis

—the authentic confusion translated into a refrain and a verbal error; the error and inadequacy of this people. It is strange, powerful, cross-grained: a tension worked out, in full view, in this unusual kind of play: the facts of farce and the facts of killing.

The crisis of O'Casey's drama is the working-out of this complicated emotion. What is at issue, always, is the relation between the language of men in intense experience and the inflated, engaging language of men avoiding experience. It is a very deep disturbance, which I suppose comes out of that confused history. But what seems to me to happen, as O'Casey goes on, is the hardening of a mannerism which overrides this crucial and difficult distinction. Juno and the Paycock is powerful and unforgettable because the distinction is dramatized, in the loose but authentic form which alone, within naturalism, could express it. The Plough and the Stars (1926) has resemblances to this, and in fact moves nearer the action that would finally have to be faced if this endless paradox—the reality of suffering and the pathetic winking confusion—was to be directly explored. But there is a change in the language, a development from the earlier plays but now exceptionally self-conscious, as if always with an eye on the audience:

It would take something more than a thing like you to flutther a feather o'Fluther.

Is a man fermentin' with fear to stick th' showin' off to him of a thing that looks like a shinin' shroud?

Phrases like this have been repeatedly quoted as an "Elizabethan" richness; but they are, in their origin and development, and where successful in their direct dramatic use, the consistent evidence of poverty: of a starved, showing-off imagination. I remember reacting very bitterly against them, and against the repeated tricks of colour—the naming of colours—which O'Casey carried to the point of parody. But the real point is more complex. Through all the early plays, it is the fact of evasion, and the verbal inflation that covers it, that O'Casey at once creates and criticizes: Boyle and Joxer, or again Fluther, are in the same movement engaging and despicable; talking to hold the attention from the fact that they have nothing to say. Yet then the manner spills over, into a different dramatic speech. It flares, successfully, into the shouted abuse of the over-crowded people, as here in The Plough and the Stars:

BESSIE. Bessie Burgess doesn't put up to know much, never havin' a swaggerin' mind, thanks be to God, but goin' on packin' up knowledge accordin' to her conscience: precept upon precept, line upon line; here a little, an' there a little. But thanks be to Christ, she knows when she was got, where she was got, an' how she was got; while there's some she knows, decoratin' their finger with a well-polished wedding-ring, would be hard put to it if they were assed to show their weddin' lines!

MRS. GOGAN. Y' oul' rip of a blasted liar …

This almost formal rhetoric, in the daily quarrels, connects with the more difficult use: the almost habitual showing-off. But it is critically different from what looks like the same manner applied to intense feeling, as in Nora in The Plough and the Stars:

While your little red-lipp'd Nora can go on sittin' here, makin' a companion of th' loneliness of th' night …

… It's hard to force away th' tears of happiness at th' end of an awful agony.

The paradoxical force of the language, endlessly presenting and self-conscious, at once to others and to the audience, drives through the play, but not as richness: as the sound, really, of a long confusion and disintegration. A characteristic and significant action is repeated: while the men are dying, in the Easter rising, the people of the tenements are looting, and lying about themselves. It is an unbearable contrast, and it is the main emotion O'Casey had to show: of nerves ragged by talking which cannot connect with the direct and terrible action. The use of random colour, of flags, of slogans, of rhetoric and comic inflation, of the sentimental song, of reminiscences of theatre (as in Nora repeating the mad Ophelia) is a rush of disintegration, of catching at temporary effects, which is quite unique: in a way, already, the separated consciousness, writing from within a life it cannot accept in its real terms yet finds endlessly engaging and preoccupying: the structure of feeling of the self-exile, still within a collective action, which can be neither avoided nor taken wholly seriously; neither indifferent nor direct.

Those three Abbey plays—Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars—are a substantial but increasingly precarious achievement. The emotion is so difficult, so deeply paradoxical, that no simple development was possible. As it happened, O'Casey went away: all his remaining plays were written in exile, and there was a turning-point in his life when the Abbey Theatre, stupidly and unjustly, rejected The Silver Tassie. We have already seen the paradox, when the connection with Irish life and theatre was direct. That essential tension might have worked out differently, in a continuing contact. As it was, O'Casey went on elaborating his unusual forms: in a way released, in a way deprived.

The Silver Tassie (1928) is a serious experiment in a new form: an extension of naturalism to what is presented as an expressionist crisis. The first and last acts are again the crowded, overflowing talk of the Abbey plays; excited and colourful in its superficial actions—the winning of the cup, the victory dance, the songs—but with a cold using of people, a persistent indifference to each other, that repeats, more bitterly, the paradoxical emotions of the earlier plays. The more the cry of colour and of triumph goes up, the more deprived and shut-off are the honest people. To praise the colour and excitement in abstraction is then not only critically foolish; it insults this genuine and persistent sense of loss and poverty. But the difficulty is inherent: O'Casey shows an emptiness, a terrible passivity, through the continual jerking of what presents itself as excitement. It is as if, as often in the earlier plays, he is at times himself carried away by the surface vitality; though what he always comes back to, when he shows the people, is an empty incapacity, an indifference and a cruelty.

The two middle acts of The Silver Tassie are a newly direct presentation—in their form critically conscious—of the determining suffering. It is the repetition, in bitter parody, of the recourse to song: the exposed soldiers finding a desperate voice, and beside them the alienated, clipped orders—the false clarity of the war. The second act is still one of the most remarkable written in English in this century, but it has the same uncertainty, the root uncertainty, of the earlier work. The critical showing, of what the war does to these men, is brilliantly achieved:

       Stumbling, swiftly cursing, plodding,
       Lumbering, loitering, stumbling, grousing,
       Through mud and rain and filth and danger
       Flesh and blood seek slow the front line.

But they are not only exposed victims. Their final chant is to the glory of the gun: they compound their suffering. And they cannot break through, at the crisis of exposure, to reason:

But wy'r we 'ere, wy'r we 'ere,—that's wot I wants to know. Why's 'e 'ere, why's 'e 'ere—that's wot 'e wants to know. We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.

It is the persistent feeling: the exposed and deprived who cannot understand what is happening to them; who can talk, within limits, in their own idiom, but then fall for an alien rhetoric. It is a very deep kind of despair, and when the soldiers have become numbers, in the casualty ward, what we see again, in the reactions of others, is an indifference and cruelty. O'Casey had here his hero: the footballer who is paralysed by a wound, who watches his girl despise him and go dancing with his friend. It is the image he always returns to: of a trapped consciousness, suffering the noisy vitality of what is supposed to be a liberation. The songs point the feeling, but also, in a sense, compound it:

       Let him come, let him sigh, let him go,
       For he is a life on the ebb,
       We a full life on the flow.

It is that ebb, that long ebb, that O'Casey writes, but through that what sounds, in inattention, like life on the flow.

The Silver Tassie is memorable and important. The uncertainty and the paradox find their way into parts of the form, but the general power is still there. In his later work, O'Casey experimented continually, out of touch with the theatre. What got him another kind of reputation was a play like The Star Turns Red (1940): a formally rhetorical communism, which overlies the difficult and incompatible social experience, the shouting frustration and loss. He dramatizes a class of attitudes, with the flags and slogans now offered in their own right. Only a careless external glance would accept them. Red Roses for Me (1943) is a replay of the Abbey work, with the mannerism of colour—the external colour of names and sashes—intense. But the most interesting later work is where the interest always was: in the true nature of that endless fantasy of Irish talk. There is an unusually straight dramatization of the theme—the frustration of ordinary life under the sparks of a now organized showing-off—in the post-liberation Ireland of The Bishop's Bonfire (1955): a directly successful play. There is also the experiment—away on his own—with an area between pantomime and folk-play, as in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949). It is a different Irish experience that he now has in view: he has identified the enemies of the people as the Church and business and order; what crows against this is the life and play—the liberation through fancy—which he had seen, in his earlier work, shot through by the killing—at once irrepressible and their own worst enemies. It was easier, perhaps, when he could identify a cause; but it was at a distance—a felt dramatic distance—from that original confusion and intensity. It is to the Abbey plays that we still go back, but watchfully, moved and involved and yet without sentiment: seeing what happened, what so strangely happened, as the rhetoric and the reality collided, memorably, and then lurched away singing, gesturing, suffering.