Fifteen Eighty Four

At the time of writing, I am lucky enough to be working as a visiting fellow at the Arts and Humanities Institute of Maynooth University in Kildare.  The university houses the archives of Teresa Deevy, a remarkable Irish playwright whose work had been largely overlooked by critics after her death in 1963 until some recovery work that started less than two decades ago and has involved the Mint Theater in New York, a range of brilliant Irish academics, and organisations including Ireland’s national theatre and the national broadcaster.

Deevy was born in Waterford in 1894, to a family where she was the youngest of thirteen siblings.  Her father died when she was only three years old.  She went on to study in Dublin at the start of the revolutionary decade in 1913, and later joined republican paramilitary group Cumann-na-mBan.  After only a year as a student in Dublin she transferred to Cork, but during her studies she received a diagnosis of Ménière’s disease, which soon left her completely deaf.  Nonetheless, she became determined to pursue a literary career.  She started to write drama which, by 1925, she was submitting to the Abbey Theatre.  Although she initially found her writing rejected by the playhouse, her script The Reapers was accepted for production in 1930, and this kick-started a memorably productive period, when six of her plays appeared on the national theatre’s stage.  However, in 1942 the theatre turned down her work Wife to James Whelan, leaving Deevy bitterly disappointed.  Although she continued writing, she never regained the popularity and critical success of her Abbey-Theatre time.

There are striking parallels here with the biography of a playwright who came to prominence shortly before Deevy.  Sean O’Casey was born in Dublin in 1880, to a family where he claimed to have been the youngest of thirteen siblings (although he was probably the youngest of seven).  His father died when he was only six years old.  O’Casey lived in Dublin throughout the revolutionary period, and in about 1905 joined the secret revolutionary group the Irish Republican Brotherhood.  When he was six years old, O’Casey received a diagnosis of trachoma, an eye disease associated with poor living conditions, which left him visually impaired for life.  Nonetheless, he became determined to pursue a literary career.  He started to write drama which, by 1916, he was submitting to the Abbey Theatre.  Although he initially found his writing rejected by the playhouse, his script The Shadow of a Gunman was accepted for production in 1923, and this kick-started a memorably productive period, when five of his plays appeared on the national theatre’s stage.  However, in 1928, the theatre turned down his work The Silver Tassie, leaving O’Casey bitterly disappointed.  Although he continued writing, he never retained the popularity and critical success of his Abbey-Theatre time.

At times, Teresa Deevy’s playwriting echoes aspects of Sean O’Casey’s work.  For example, O’Casey’sbest-known play, his 1926 piece The Plough and the Stars,commences with Fluther Good fixing a lock on the entrance to a run-down tenement.  Fluther opens and shuts this door to show that it works, and thus lets the outside world intrude into the rapidly deteriorating relationship of the play’s married couple.  Deevy’s 1932 work Temporal Powers likewise begins with the character of Michael Donovan in an old, ruined building trying to fix a hinge to an entrance, and his failure to fix the door properly triggers some of the marital hostility that drives the plot forward.

Deevy herself could certainly identify, and feel sensitive about, moments when other writers may have been emulating O’Casey.  She mentored the younger Waterford playwright James Cheasty, reading his play A Stranger Came, and commenting: ‘I […] wonder if unconsciously you have copied O’Casey here…his party scene in Juno – maybe you never dreamed of that when writing and even if you did no great crime!’.[1]  At another time she commented on one of Cheasty’s drafts, ‘One thing I did not like – in order to lighten the atmosphere, and introduce a little humour it seemed to me you brought in the examination of the pictures on the wall…Well, I may be wrong – but it seemed to savour of O’Casey, and it was the first time – and only time – you laid yourself open to the charge of “copying O’Casey” – Now, because your work is very individual, and has so fine an integrity, this it to be regretted’.[2]

I have just finished editing the volume Sean O’Casey in Context, and it is my hope that the volume will help scholars to connect O’Casey’s life and work with some of the less well-known stories of Irish and wider history.  As the parallel above between O’Casey and Teresa Deevy is intended to show, one of those less-familiar narrative strands that profoundly interests me is the connection between O’Casey and women’s experience.  In recent years there has been a productive scholarly turn towards reappraising the overlooked female figures from Irish history, and O’Casey in Context certainly leans into that turn.  The book includes a chapter entirely devoted to gender and sexuality, and another one revolving around O’Casey’s relationship with women, as well as other chapters solely about, or touching upon, some of the key female figures who shaped O’Casey’s life and legacy.  The women discussed in these chapters include the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Augusta Gregory; O’Casey’s wife Eileen Carey; the African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry; the Dublin poet Paula Meehan, the Austrian artist Alice Berger Hammerschlag; and the Galway-based theatre-director Garry Hynes.

Such recovery work is needed because published scholarship on O’Casey has significantly dried up since a heyday in the 1980s.  Then, at roughly the centenary of O’Casey’s birth, a range of monographs, specialist journals, and editions of his writing were in print.  But there have, by contrast, been relatively few publications dedicated to O’Casey since the publication of Christopher Murray’s ground-breaking biography Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work in 2004, and as a result, some of the wider trends and emphases in wider literary scholarship have bypassed O’Casey.  The support of Cambridge University Press in developing Sean O’Casey in Context has therefore provided an excellent opportunity to connect O’Casey with a range of evolving, contested, and neglected contexts, and to see him in a range of new and unexpected lights.  One of these important contexts is his relationship with women and women’s issues.  But other contexts explored by the first-rate contributors to the book include race, ecocriticism, class, censorship, and disability.

Unhappily, one of these contributors to Sean O’Casey in Context, the wonderful O’Casey scholar Christopher Murray, died whilst the book was in production and so never lived to see the final version.  He is remembered by many in academia and wider afield for his work on O’Casey and for books including Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to a Nation (1997) and The Theatre of Brian Friel (2014).  He is also fondly remembered as editor of the Irish University Review, and as President of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures.  He has been a generous help to me, especially when I was planning Sean O’Casey in Context as well as an earlier book that I published on O’Casey in 2013, and I was delighted that he agreed to contribute a brilliant chapter to the new volume (Chapter 33: ‘The Letters’).  Over the years, his ideas about O’Casey have informed myself and many of the other scholars whose chapters are included in Sean O’Casey in Context, and so I am pleased, though deeply saddened, that the book offers one final encounter with his compassionate, witty, and perceptive line of thought.

[1] Deevy letter of 24 April 1953, in the University of Maynooth, James Cheasty Archive, IE/MU/PP43/1/3 (7).

[2] Deevy letter of 15 October [no year], in the University of Maynooth, James Cheasty Archive, IE/MU/PP43/1/2/2 (74-75).

Sean O’Casey in Context
by James Moran