The Essential O'Casey [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Sean O'Casey first turned seriously to writing plays around the year 1920, when he was approaching the age oL forty. This had been preceded by two decades of intense participation in the national and class struggles of his native Ire-land-as a champion of Gaelic culture, militant trade-unionist and socialist activist. From the early twenties to his death in 1964 playwriting became his chief occupation. He was the first English-speaking dramatist of proletarian background to enter the arena of world theatre. This is a book about his plays. These plays he regarded as weapons, a continuation of the same struggle with different means-the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people and all working people from poverty, ignorance and exploitation, for the creation of a new society in which men and women would be free to develop all their capacities as harmonious human beings. Alongside his playwriting he continued to express this standpoint in direct political activity-in his connection with London Unity Theatre in the late thirties, his work on the Advisory Board of the Daily Worker, his call to support the World Peace Council's Stockholm Appeal against nuclear weapons in the early fifties, his solidarity with Republican Spain and the Soviet Union, and so on. How did O'Casey use the drama as a weapon? Does his use of it in this way bear out the view that politics (usually meaning left-wing political partisanship) are best kept out of art, for art's sake? Or was he able to get away with combining the two because-as some critics have proposed-his Communism was of an "unorthodox" or "Christian" brand?1 Or can we appreciate O'Casey and ignore his Communism, as the U.S. critic John Gassner advocates?2 Or does O'Ca-sey's work demonstrate that in the modern world only a preoccupation with these things can lead to enduring artistic achievement, true realism? I hope that this book will throw some light on these questions. 11