A socialist, humanist, and an atheist, Sean O’Casey’s plays tackled or ridiculed most aspects of politics and religion. It is a mistake, however, to bracket O’Casey solely as a political playwright, rather than a man who was curious and easy in the company of all politics, religion or none.
In her foreword, the playwright’s daughter, Shivaun O’Casey, urges readers not to judge the plays of her father on their politics alone. Paul O’Brien has done an impressive task of distilling a body of work and a life as filled as O’Casey’s was by politics, into a new and richly detailed survey of the life of times of one of “the most political writers of his generation”.
O’Casey’s stages and characters are the poor, the working classes, the every-man and woman who are so often not given a voice in literature. O’Brien points to the influence on the young O’Casey of Dublin’s East Wall Protestant community and the books, people and talk that filled the O’Casey household and the groups he mixed in as a young man.
Analysis of the influence of political figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, organisations such as Conradh na Gaeilge, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood are illuminating, as is O’Brien’s examination of the later O’Casey plays, those written in exile in England. O’Casey’s autobiographies, letters, writings and critical reception all form part of the “O’Casey industry” of literary studies and legacies O’Brien explores, while drawing from the O’Casey papers at the National Library of Ireland in great detail.
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In 1960, a group of Irish actors proposed that a bed be installed in every children’s hospital in Dublin named in honour of Sean O’Casey, an offer the playwright rejected stating: “A bed should be there for a need, not as a gift. Thousands of Irish children need beds at home as well as in hospital.” O’Brien reminds us of the importance of seeing O’Casey’s humanity and love borne out through his plays and writings not as a propagandist tool, but as a fire that was ignited by witnessing an unfair and unjust society.
A country in which housing, poverty and children’s hospitals are still headline news a century after O’Casey bared such issues on our national stage is surely one that is still in a state o’chassis.
The author of plays, stories, television series, novels, and journalism, Maura Laverty was a mainstay in many people’s homes and daily lives in mid-20th-century Ireland. From her journalism, to RTÉ's first drama serial, Tolka Row, and through her food writing and activism Laverty connected with the tastes and trends of a changing Ireland like few other writers. Full and Plenty (1960) is arguably her best-known book, though her novels (such as the autobiographical Never No More, 1941) were widely read in Ireland. Laverty’s food writing in particular advocated for better nutrition and cooking skills as a means of improving general health and family life. Ever ahead of her time, Laverty edited Women’s Life magazine and was Ireland’s first agony aunt in Women’s Way Magazine from 1963.
Irish theatre also owes much to Laverty’s wit, tenaciousness and journalist’s eye when writing for the stage. It is no overstatement to say that her plays saved Dublin’s Gate Theatre from financial ruin in the 1950s. Tolka Row, Laverty’s second play, was later adapted for RTÉ television to wide acclaim.
Edited by Cathy Leeny and Deirdre McFeely, The Plays of Maura Laverty brings together the complete plays of the author. Exhaustive archival research has cross-referenced multiple manuscripts and production scripts across various libraries and archives in Ireland and the US, as well as key material sourced from private collections. Texts included are Liffey Lane (1951), Tolka Row (1951), and A Tree in the Crescent (1952). The book is a labour of literary reclamation, piecing together fragments and part-scripts of Laverty’s plays and presenting them together for the first time. Notes on each text show the minutiae of scholarly examination, explaining edits made to texts, changes of titles and alternative endings as well as listing original productions and casts.
Laverty transcended multiple media in an age of transition in Irish popular culture. From radio, print, stage, and screen, from the 1930s through the 1960s, she cut an all-pervading eye across social change in modernising Ireland. Every bit the activist as much as writer, Laverty’s plays (on stage or screen) brought audiences and families into the lives and homes of every-day Ireland across the class spectrum.
From tenement dwellings in Liffey Lane to the emerging Catholic middle classes and expanding Irish urban and suburban landscape in Tolka Row and A Tree in the Crescent, the plays’ settings form an important social record of Ireland’s recent past, which Leeny and McFeely have gathered together. Laverty, like the Irish State, recognised the critical role of the family in the progression of the country. At a time when the State neglected the health of its poor and restricted the rights of its women, Laverty gave a voice to often marginalised characters in Irish society. Putting her plays back on the major stages would allow new audiences to see through a window into Laverty’s Ireland.
