Sean OCasey

Presenting the most cheerful account of theatrical warfare this side of a dress rehearsal: Hugh Hunt’s Sean O’Casey (Gill & Macmillan, 1980). A bracing biography/critical study in which a seasoned theatre historian watches Dublin’s most combustible playwright stride onstage, light a fuse, and then politely explain why the explosion was necessary.

Hunt walks us through O’Casey’s ascent from the tenements to the Abbey, where he delivered the Dublin Trilogy like a sequence of well-aimed pint glasses: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars—riotous applause and, in the latter case, actual riots. Along the way come all the greatest hits: the smoky streets, the sharp-tongued humor, the heartbreaks dressed in music-hall patter, and that unforgettable falling-out over The Silver Tassie, when Yeats said “no” and O’Casey said “grand, I’ll just become immortal elsewhere.” Hunt is very good on the craft—the political nerve, the comic timing, the way O’Casey can smuggle a lament inside a joke and make you laugh just as the floor drops away.

This is the sort of book that remembers actors’ knees, chest-of-drawers stages, and Tuesday-night tempers. Hunt has an eye for rehearsal-room weather and a taste for footnote drama; he shows how O’Casey made poetry out of pawn tickets and republican slogans, and why directors still keep a stiff drink handy before opening night. If you’ve ever wondered how a playwright can be simultaneously sentimental and savage, civic and subversive, Hunt gives you the toolkit (and a hard hat).

Details for the collectors and the merely nosy: ISBN 0717110346; publisher Gill & Macmillan; year 1980. This copy comes to you from Crappy Old Books, where the name is a mission statement, not a condition report. Speaking of which: Condition: Good—meaning the book looks as though it has attended a few matinees and only heckled twice. Expect sound binding, honest shelfwear, perhaps a rehearsal smudge here or there; the pages have not eloped and the spine does not storm off in Act Three. In short: presentable, readable, and entirely ready to tut sympathetically whenever Yeats appears.

Buy it if you like plays with backbone, history with a hangover, and the thrilling certainty that theatre matters because people keep trying to stop it. O’Casey never let a good argument go to waste. Neither does this book.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Hugh Hunt