O’Casey at your Bedside

Extract

The soil from which art will grow is ever unpredictable and its discovery after the fact often suggests that caprice, rather than mind or nature, governs the relation. Why Dublin?—one would like to know. The question recurs whenever one thinks of how much poetry and drama has come from that mediocre city in the last hundred years: Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Sean O'Casey—to say nothing of their lesser brothers inside or outside the Abbey Theatre: an unlikely but unmistakable golden age.

If we look at O'Casey, now its chief survivor, the mystery turns into paradox. For although commonly accounted a leading dramatist of the age, he commands no theatre and is rarely played. He is clearly in the Abbey tradition, but the Abbey rejected him early in his career.