COMMENT:Sean O'Casey's greatest achievement was to put on stage a varied but genuine cast of Irish characters, writes Violet O'Valle
YEARS AGO, while exploring a dusty basement in a Texas library, I discovered the magic of Sean O'Casey. In a corner, piled like scraps of kindling waiting for a match, lay several copies of Three More Plays. The one on top was folded back, as if some much earlier adventurer had been interrupted while secretly reading it, and there on that tattered page, peeping through mouldy creases, shined the opening scene of Act III of Red Roses for Me.
A group of derelicts are gathered beneath the bridges of a "bleak and bitter city", said the directions. But soon the hero enters, and in a breathtaking transformation scene, he literally dances up a radiant sunset. The hero's name is Ayamonn, or Everyman, as I was to learn, and the city is Dublin. And as soon as I could, I made my way to that shining place - carrying in my heart a legend cherished by theatre lovers all over the world.
On March 30th, 1880, a last child was born to Susan and Michael Casey, lower- middle-class residents of the city with the highest infant mortality rate in the world. Other siblings had died before little Johnny appeared, and when he was six, his father died as well, leaving the family to sink into poverty.
Johnny's lot was made harder by a chronic eye infection in early childhood. He inherited two priceless treasures, however - a thirst for reading and an entirely loving mother. Susan prodded her youngest, often reading to him from the Bible and encouraging him to commit its passages to memory.
By the time he was a young man, Johnny had gained enough strength to work on construction projects. His city was peppered with bookstalls, and sometimes on his way home he helped himself to volumes from secondhand bins. Most often it was one of Shakespeare's plays that he pulled from his jacket late in the evening, then peered at through sore eyes until dawn shoved him back into the sepia world of manual labour.
An "Irish Renaissance" swept the country. Johnny joined the Gaelic League (and became Sean), as well as the Irish Citizen Army. Because of his unique way with words, he achieved leadership in both. Discovering that he could write song lyrics and political tracts, he devoted much of his time to creative projects. In his forties, he sent some plays to the Abbey Theatre and was now on his way to becoming Ireland's greatest dramatist.
When I arrived in Dublin, I found much there I had not expected. Some scholars were bent on "proving" that O'Casey was a "fraud".
A visit to the flat where he wrote his first three plays, the undisputed masterpieces of his canon, revealed an indoor junkyard, blanketed with the smell of a fire that had almost destroyed the actual dwelling. In short, the almost indifference and downright dislike directed at my new friend astonished me.
I have listened to many excuses for this attitude, and I'm sure most of them are sincere. O'Casey's family was Protestant in a culture where that term was synonymous with exploitation. The cover page of his early publication, Songs of the Wren, brags that he was also the author of something called That Grand Oul' Dame Britannia.His treatment of the Rising in his greatest work, The Plough and the Stars, is not idealistic. And then there is his residency in England, along with his flirtation with communism.
His admirers have devoted much energy to explaining these embarrassments. They point to O'Casey's own statements affirming his respect for all religions, and they speak of his naiveté regarding communism. But such defences are irrelevant, for O'Casey's detractors do not question his essential innocence; they doubt his Irishness.
From one perspective, they may be right. Yet O'Casey's justification ironically lies snugly within his defections.
His first biographer, David Krause, mentions the "outsider" mentality that contributed to his insights. As a Protestant growing up in working-class Catholic neighbourhoods, O'Casey was never fully accepted by those he considered his friends and neighbours. At the same time, because of his poverty and involvement with the labour movement, he was generally not at home in the living rooms of his affluent co-worshippers.
This sense of exclusion may be what fostered the objectivity that allowed him to create truthful characterisations - his real legacy to Irish theatre. It allowed him to empathise with both the plough and the stars, with both Juno and the peacock, to understand Nora's point of view, as well as Jack's, to create Mary and Johnny, as well as Joxer and Boyle.
And it bestowed on him what is perhaps the most famous Irish trait - identification with the little and insignificant.
So often something in his work reminds me of the tale of the wren and the eagle. When the birds hold a contest to select a king, so the story goes, the title is to be awarded to one that flies the highest. At first, it appears the eagle has won, but then the little wren pops out of the eagle's feathers and flies a few inches higher.
In O'Casey's plays, plain people frequently pop out of obscurity to become unexpected heroes who save the day, or have the last laugh, or simply enjoy time in the spotlight. Fluther Good risking gunfire in The Plough and the Stars, O'Killigain singing through the flood in Purple Dust- and then there is Everyman resurrecting Dublin with a dance.
Joyce secured his reputation by introducing new techniques to fiction. Yeats's greatness lies in his mysticism. Synge reproduced rural language and culture. But O'Casey's greatness - and Irishness - rests with his characters. For it is the people who make a country.
When our hearts stir to our national anthems, it may appear that we are celebrating star-spangled banners or soldiers grouping beneath starry heavens. But we are actually celebrating each other. And O'Casey deserves our approbation because he reproduced so truthfully so many kinds of Irishmen for us to celebrate.
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Violet O'Valle is the artistic director of Pantagleize Theatre Company in Fort Worth, Texas