Sean O'Casey Livres

317 pages The Silver Tassie; Purple Dust; Red Roses for Me with and introduction be JC Trewin

Collection of color photographs with quotes from works of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. Work-in-progress for 25 years. A spiritual journey through Ireland. Need not be Irish to appreciate work. Photos include Northern The Giant's Causeway, Glens of Antrim, etc. Spectacular photo of Cliffs of Moher, Eyeries, a rainbow over Youghal Harbor. Intro includes author's Irish connection from youth on Tipperary Hill, Syracuse, NY site of the only traffic signal in world with green lens above red.

Sean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind that is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life.

This is the story of Sean Casey's childhood, written in two acts for 4 men and 2 women. It was originally staged on Broadway as a concert reading.

In his early forties, while continuing to support himself as a laborer, we wrote, in quick succession three realistic plays about the slums of Dublin, known as the Dublin Trilogy." Juno and the Paycock," the second installment of the trilogy, was performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1924--the Abbey theatre produced the first installment of the trilogy, "The Shadow of a Gunman" (not included in this volume) in 1923." Juno and the Paycock "deals with the unpleasantness of war and the misery of the victims during the the Irish struggle for indepenence. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. As his career progressed, O'Casey experiemented with expressionism and symbolism, which resulted in "Within the Gates;" "Red Roses for Me," a semiautobiographical work; and "Cock-a-Doodle Dandy," Due to an increase of nationalism during the Civil War and Irish Independence movement, his plays were received well, although, at times, with protest and restriction.

A murderer becomes the toast of the village as his charm negates his crime. A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State. All these plays were met with moral outrage and rioting in their native Ireland.Yeats's 'The Countess Cathleen' (1892), J. M. Synge's 'The Playboy of the Western World' (1907) and O'Casey's 'Cock-a-doodle Dandy' (1949) emerged from a period of traumatic change for Ireland. While the plays bear witness to the immmense social upheavals of the turn of the twentieth century, they also represent a new age of Irish drama that rose from the turmoil, and their lessons ring true to this day.

A play set in the tenements of Dublin in 1922, just after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, revolving around the misfortunes of the dysfunctional Boyle family ("Juno and the paycock"). A tragicomedy set during the Irish War of Independence centering on the mistaken identity of a building tenant who is thought to be an IRA assassin ("The shadow of a gunman"). A play set in Dublin addressing the 1916 Easter Rising ("The plough and the stars")