by Sean O'Casey
Fluther Eh, who are you chuckin’, eh?
Sergeant Tinley (roughly) Gow on, git aht, you blighter.
Fluther Who are you callin’ a blighter to, eh? I’m a Dublin man, born an’ bred in th’ city, see?
Sergeant Tinley I down’t care if you were Broin Buroo; git aht, git aht.
Fluther (halting as he is going out) Jasus, you an’ your guns! Leave them down, an’ I’d beat th’ two o’ yous without sweatin’!
Peter, Brennan, the Covey, and Fluther, followed by the soldiers, go out. Bessie is sleeping heavily on the chair by the fire. After a pause, Nora appears at door, left, in her nightdress. Remaining at door for a few moments she looks vaguely around the room. She then comes in quietly, goes over to the fire, pokes it, and puts the kettle on. She thinks for a few moments, pressing her hand to her forehead. She looks questioningly at the fire, and then at the press at back. She goes to the press, opens it, takes out a soiled cloth and spreads it on the table. She then places things for tea on the table.
Nora I imagine th’ room looks very odd somehow … I was nearly forgetting Jack’s tea … Ah, I think I’ll have everything done before he gets in … (She lilts gently, as she arranges the table.)
Th’ violets were scenting th’ woods, Nora,
Displaying their charms to th’ bee,
When I first said I lov’d only you, Nora,
An’ you said you lov’d only me.
Th’ chestnut blooms gleam’d through th’ glade, Nora,
A robin sang loud from a tree,
When I first said I lov’d only you, Nora,
An’ you said you lov’d only me.
She pauses suddenly, and glances round the room.
(Doubtfully) I can’t help feelin’ this room very strange … what is it? … What is it? … I must think … I must thry to remember …
Voices (chanting in a distant street) Ambu … lance, Ambu … lance! Red Cro … ss, Red Cro … ss!
Nora (startled and listening for a moment, then resuming the arrangement of the table)
Trees, birds, an’ bees sang a song, Nora,
Of happier transports to be,
When I first said I lov’d only you, Nora,
An’ you said you lov’d only me.
A burst of rifle fire is heard in a street near by, followed by the rapid tok, tok, tok of a machine-gun.
(Staring in front of her and screaming) Jack, Jack, Jack! My baby, my baby, my baby!
Bessie (waking with a start) You divil, are you afther gettin’ out o’ bed again!
She rises and runs towards Nora, who rushes to the window, which she frantically opens.
Nora (at window, screaming) Jack, Jack, for God’s sake, come to me!
Soldiers (outside, shouting) Git away, git away from that window, there!
Bessie (seizing hold of Nora) Come away, come away, woman, from that window!
Nora (struggling with Bessie) Where is it; where have you hidden it? Oh, Jack, Jack, where are you?
Bessie (imploringly) Mrs Clitheroe, for God’s sake, come away!
Nora (fiercely) I won’t; he’s below. Let … me … go!
You’re thryin’ to keep me from me husband. I’ll follow him. Jack, Jack, come to your Nora!
Bessie Hus-s-sh, Nora, Nora! He’ll be here in a minute. I’ll bring him to you, if you’ll only be quiet – honest to God, I will.
With a great effort Bessie pushes Nora away from the window, the force used causing her to stagger against it herself. Two rifle shots ring out in quick succession. Bessie jerks her body convulsively; stands stiffly for a moment, a look of agonized astonishment on her face, then she staggers forward, leaning heavily on the table with her hands.
(With an arrested scream of fear and pain) Merciful God, I’m shot, I’m shot, I’m shot! … Th’ life’s pourin’ out o’ me! (To Nora) I’ve got this through … through you … through you, you bitch, you! … O God, have mercy on me! … (To Nora) You wouldn’t stop quiet, no, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, blast you! Look at what I’m afther gettin’, look at what I’m afther gettin’ … I’m bleedin’ to death, an’ no one’s here to stop th’ flowin’ blood! (Calling) Mrs Gogan, Mrs Gogan! Fluther, Fluther, for God’s sake, somebody, a doctor, a doctor!
She staggers frightened towards the door, to seek for aid, but, weakening half-way across the room, she sinks to her knees, and bending forward, supports herself with her hands resting on the floor. Nora is standing rigidly with her back to the wall opposite, her trembling hands held out a little from the sides of her body, her lips quivering, her breast heaving, staring wildly at the figure of Bessie.
Nora (in a breathless whisper) Jack, I’m frightened … I’m frightened, Jack … Oh, Jack, where are you?
Bessie (moaningly) This is what’s afther comin’ on me for nursin’ you day an’ night … I was a fool, a fool, a fool!
Get me a dhrink o’ wather, you jade, will you? There’s a fire burnin’ in me blood! (Pleadingly) Nora, Nora, dear, for God’s sake, run out an’ get Mrs Gogan, or Fluther, or somebody to bring a doctor, quick, quick, quick!
Nora does not stir.
Blast you, stir yourself, before I’m gone!
Nora Oh, Jack, Jack, where are you?
Bessie (in a whispered moan) Jesus Christ, me sight’s goin’! It’s all dark, dark! Nora, hold me hand! (Bessie’s body lists over and she sinks into a prostrate position on the floor.) I’m dyin’, I’m dyin’ … I feel it … Oh God, oh God! (She feebly sings.)
I do believe, I will believe
That Jesus died for me;
That on th’ cross He shed His blood,
From sin to set me free …
I do believe … I will believe
… Jesus died … me;
… th’ cross He shed … blood,
From sin … free.
She ceases singing, and lies stretched out, still and very rigid. A pause. Then Mrs Gogan runs in hastily.
Mrs Gogan (quivering with fright) Blessed be God, what’s afther happenin’? (To Nora) What’s wrong, child, what’s wrong? (She sees Bessie, runs to her and bends over the body.) Bessie, Bessie! (She shakes the body.) Mrs Burgess, Mrs Burgess! (She feels Bessie’s forehead.) My God, she’s as cold as death. They’re afther murdherin’ th’ poor inoffensive woman!
Sergeant Tinley and Corporal Stoddart enter agitatedly, their rifles at the ready.
Sergeant Tinley (excitedly) This is the ’ouse. That’s the window!
Nora (pressing back against the wall) Hide it, hide it; cover it up, cover it up!
Sergeant Tinley (going over to the body) ’Ere, what’s this? Who’s this? (Looking at Bessie) Oh Gawd, we’ve plugged one of the women of the ’ouse.
Corporal Stoddart Whoy the ’ell did she gow to the window? Is she dead?
Sergeant Tinley Oh, dead as bedamned. Well, we couldn’t afford to toike any chawnces.
Nora (screaming) Hide it, hide it; don’t let me see it! Take me away, take me away, Mrs Gogan!
Mrs Gogan runs into room, left, and runs out again with a sheet which she spreads over the body of Bessie.
Mrs Gogan (as she spreads the sheet) Oh, God help her, th’ poor woman, she’s stiffenin’ out as hard as she can! Her face has written on it th’ shock o’ sudden agony, an’ her hands is whitenin’ into th’ smooth shininess of wax.
Nora (whimperingly) Take me away, take me away; don’t leave me here to be lookin’ an’ lookin’ at it!
Mrs Gogan (going over to Nora and putting her arm around her) Come on with me, dear, an’ you can doss in poor Mollser’s bed, till we gather some neighbours to come an’ give th’ last friendly touches to Bessie in th’ lonely layin’ of her out.
Mrs Gogan and Nora go out slowly.
Corporal Stoddart (who has been looking around, to Sergeant Tinley) Tea here, Sergeant. Wot abaht a cup of scald?
Sergeant Tinley Pour it aht, Stoddart, pour it aht. I could scoff hanything just now.
Corporal Stoddart pours out two cups
of tea, and the two soldiers begin to drink. In the distance is heard a bitter burst of rifle and machine-gun fire, interspersed with the boom, boom of artillery. The glare in the sky seen through the window flares into a fuller and a deeper red.
There gows the general attack on the Powst Office.
Voices (in a distant street) Ambu … lance, Ambu … lance! Red Cro … ss, Red Cro … ss!
Voices of Soldiers (at a barricade outside the house; singing)
They were summoned from the ’illside,
They were called in from the glen,
And the country found ’em ready
At the stirring call for men.
Let not tears add to their ’ardship,
As the soldiers pass along,
And although our ’eart is breaking,
Make it sing this cheery song.
Sergeant Tinleyand Corporal Stoddart (joining in the chorus, as they sip the tea)
Keep the ’owme fires burning,
While your ’earts are yearning;
Though your lads are far away
They dream of ’owme;
There’s a silver loining
Through the dark cloud shoining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out,
Till the boys come ’owme!
Curtain.
Introduction to Sean O’Casey
There are some writers whose personalities and life-histories are so attractive that we find ourselves drawn to them and captivated even before taking their work into account. Sean O’Casey was one of those writers. An underdog all his life and without benefit of more than the most basic education, O’Casey spoke out loudly and often on all matters to do with human rights. Born into poverty, he always sympathised with the poor and the underprivileged. He became not only a playwright of the people but a constant commentator, in letters to the newspapers and in articles for magazines, on injustices of every kind. Indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that O’Casey’s whole life and career were dedicated to opposing injustice wherever and whenever he saw it.
But every writer is governed and moulded by the time and place in which he or she is born and brought up. When O’Casey was born in Dublin on 30 March 1880, that city was still a British colony ruled from Westminster. As a Protestant, O’Casey (or, as his name was before he gave it a Gaelic spelling, ‘John Casey’) was automatically unionist in politics. Even though working class (Michael Casey was a clerk), the Casey family saw themselves as apart from the Roman Catholic majority, who were for the most part nationalists in favour of Home Rule for Ireland. O’Casey might have settled himself comfortably into lower-middle-class Dublin life by using the advantages of his Protestant connections, even though, being poor, he lacked the privileges which allowed fellow-Dubliners Synge and Wilde to attend Dublin University (Trinity College); to be Protestant in Dublin one hundred years ago was at least to be on the winning side. But poverty, especially after his father’s death when the boy was only six years old, and the eye disease trachoma seriously stunted O’Casey’s development. He had only three years’ education up to the age of fourteen, but benefited from his older sister Bella’s qualifications as a teacher. After that, while working on and off in lowly jobs in Dublin businesses in his teenage years, O’Casey educated himself by reading all the books that he could lay his hands on and his painful eyesight would allow him to study. In particular, he steeped himself in the Bible – a requirement of his Sunday-school class – and Shakespeare (O’Casey’s brother was a part-time actor). Finding that Dublin libraries were ill-stocked in the materials which interested him most, O’Casey formed the habit of buying cheap editions of the great authors in the second-hand bookstores. A love of learning, often the most powerful fuel of the would-be writer, was thus early fostered. Ever afterwards O’Casey was a voracious reader, not just in dramatic literature (where Shaw became a favourite alongside Shakespeare) but also in poetry, religious studies, art and music. It is no surprise that the characters in his plays to whom O’Casey is most sympathetic are usually those who strive to lift themselves out of a restrictive environment through reading. Later in life, O’Casey wrote essays on the writers he most admired: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Gorki, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, and many more. The view he adhered to all his life was that books were for all, not just for the educated, and that they were as important to the working person as bread on the table.
When regular office employment of any kind proved impossible for O’Casey (mainly because he could not put up with the grovelling to authority it seemed to require), he took up hard manual labour with the Dublin railways. He enjoyed the outdoor work with pick and shovel but when he insisted on his right to join a trade union in 1911 he was dismissed. From that time on, until his plays began to make money, O’Casey could get work only occasionally, and he lived a simple hard life with his mother Susan on little more than her old-age pension until she died in November 1918. He then set about making his living as a writer, first of popular verse, then as historian of the Irish Citizen Army (which had fought without his help in the 1916 Easter Rising) and eventually, from 1923, as a playwright for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Once his plays proved successful enough to be accepted in London he went to live there and never again worked at anything else but full-time writing.
The rejection by the Abbey Theatre of his anti-war play The Silver Tassie in 1928 led O’Casey into more experimental work. It is often said that the break with the Abbey, where he had learned his trade, was tragic for O’Casey; in any event, although Within the Gates (1934) and The Star Turns Red (1940) were brave experiments, these and other later plays were not successful on the London stage. By this time O’Casey was fully committed to Communism, although never a member of the party, and this commitment increasingly told against him. His first biographer, David Krause, has described O’Casey as ‘a moral pacifist as well as a militant socialist’, and this accurately sums up O’Casey’s political position. It is little wonder that when the English theatre underwent a revolution in 1956 and angry new writers emerged, they showed their admiration for O’Casey by writing in a somewhat similar, realistic but anti-establishment mode. There was thus a renewal of interest in O’Casey’s plays around 1960, by which time he was eighty years old and close to death. So far as most critics of modern drama are concerned, O’Casey’s best work was complete with The Plough and the Stars, written almost forty years before his death in Torquay, Devon, in September 1964. But he himself always insisted that his later, experimental, plays were better.
The material of the three Dublin plays – The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars – owes a lot to O’Casey’s experience as a young man involved in Irish political and cultural life. From about 1906 he was a member of the Gaelic League where he learned the Irish language, first changed his name, and became fiercely nationalistic. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood not long afterwards and rejoiced in writing anti-British propaganda. But when Jim Larkin (1882–1947) arrived in Dublin from Liverpool and set about creating an active trade-union movement, O’Casey began to abandon all religious, cultural and republican organisations in favour of socialism. The great lock-out of 1913, which saw thousands of Dublin manual workers in opposition to the bosses controlling the transport and distribution industries and services, showed O’Casey that the cause of labour took precedence over the cause of Irish freedom. He was appointed secretary of the Irish Citizen Army which Larkin formed in 1914 for the defence of the workers and for a while he was active in administration. But, characteristically, he was unable to reconcile his own views with those of the majority and resigned in 1914 on a policy matter. O’Casey was thus isolated by the time of the 1916 Rising. He became a spectator of Irish political life when he might have been a major participant.
The 1916 Rising, led by Pádraic Pearse (Commandant, Irish Volunteers) and James Connolly (Commandant, Irish Citizen Army), was an abortive one. It took place in some confusion on Easter Monday 1916 following an attempt by the chie
f of staff of the Irish Volunteers (Eoin MacNeill) to cancel the proceedings. Pearse and Connolly, in defiance of MacNeill, led a revolt which failed to spread outside the city of Dublin. No more than 2,000 men in all participated, taking over the General Post Office and other strategic sites in Dublin. This heroic but foolhardy undertaking, marred by indecision, poor communications, lack of firepower, and lack of general support, was easily crushed by British forces within a week. Pearse, Connolly and thirteen other leaders were summarily executed. It was these executions that changed the political climate in Ireland and precipitated the guerilla war of independence which led to the signing of the Treaty between Britain and Ireland in 1921, and the establishment of a twenty-six-county Free State in the South.
O’Casey, while admiring the courage of those who fought in 1916, saw the enterprise as a waste of life and effort. In particular, he faulted Connolly for deflecting the cause of labour into a nationalist struggle. By making an alliance between the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers under Pearse, Connolly had, in O’Casey’s analysis, betrayed the true purpose of the Irish Citizen Army and taken part in a charade. He makes this point in his Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). O’Casey’s attitude towards the Rising, then, tended to be critical and condemnatory. By this time, and especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution (which he applauded), nationalism was for him a delusion.
This was not always the case. His early writings, journalistic pieces and poems, were unashamedly republican in theme and language. After 1913 his writings became more socialist than nationalist but were still propagandist in style. It is indeed remarkable that such a fanatic as O’Casey’s early writings show him to have been (as evidenced in the collection of his early work entitled Feathers from the Green Crow) should ever have grown into a major dramatic artist. There is something miraculous about this shift in direction, though ‘fate’ and O’Casey’s character no doubt were other factors. But the three Dublin plays are like the great war poems written by Owen, Sassoon and others: they would not have anything like their impact and intensity were it not for the author’s personal and complex experience, which rendered them pacifist in outlook.
