Three Dublin plays - Sean O'Casey

Three early plays by Sean O'Casey--arguably his three
greatest--demonstrate vividly O'Casey's ability to convey the reality of
life and the depth of human emotion, specifically in Dublin before and
during the Irish civil war of 1922-23, but, truly, throughout the known
universe.


In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement
dwellers in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in The Plough and the Stars,
Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that
create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that
the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings.


As Seamus
Heaney has written, "O'Casey's characters are both down to earth and
larger than life . . . His democratic genius was at one with his tragic
understanding, and his recoil from tyranny and his compassion for the
oppressed were an essential--as opposed to a moral and thematic--part of
his art."