Eire Apparent: Recalling Sean O’Casey’s Vanished Ireland
Eire Apparent: Recalling Sean O’Casey’s Vanished Ireland
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Caption from LIFE. Woman downstairs appears in many O'Casey plays. O'Casey's real-life woman downstairs was kindly Katie Kenna who stood by him in tragic days and is still at 18 Abercorn Road.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Few Irish writers ever held a grip on their native land’s imagination as powerful as Sean O’Casey’s (1880 – 1964). There was Joyce, of course, and Bernard Shaw and Yeats; Frank O’Connor and Flann O’Brien; Synge, Swift, and Oscar Wilde; and the long, long list of phenomenal post-war Irish novelists, poets and dramatists, from Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh to Edna O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett (who of course penned his greatest works in French) and so many others.
But as LIFE magazine wrote in a 1954 article: “Now that Bernard Shaw, an Irishman, and Eugene O’Neill, son of an Irishman, are dead, the greatest living playwright in the English language is another Irishman, Sean O’Casey.”
Three brilliant plays — “The Shadow of a Gunman,” “Juno and the Paycock” and “The Plough and the Stars” — all set in Dublin during the bitter days of street fighting and sudden death, made O’Casey famous. They brought as vividly alive as the red geraniums that so often bloom in Dublin windows the world he was born into, the Dublin slums where grinding poverty lives behind graceful Georgian facades, plain people talk with rich imagery, and saloon brawls erupt over philosophical questions
O’Casey . . . has spoken unkindly of the churches, dedicated books to eminent theologians, sung the praises of Communism and written the soul-stirring words that caused riots, bannings and uproars in great cities.
Years ago Sean O’Casey left Dublin, and now at 70 he lives peacefully in England’s Devonshire countryside. Behind him his world, also grown older and more peaceable, still exists in the streets of north Dublin, as full of poetry and misery as ever it was. There Gjon Mili found and photographed it.
Six decades later — when much, but not quite all, of the world that O’Casey brought to life on stage and on the printed page has vanished with the years — LIFE.com recalls an Ireland that endures in fading memory, in literature, and in Gjon Mili’s wonderful pictures.
Caption from LIFE. Far from Dublin, O'Casey stands in his home in England. On the wall behind him is a portrait done by the famous British artist, Augustus John, 28 years ago when O'Casey, fresh from his early triumphs in Dublin, was a literary lion of London.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. On Abercorn Road the house where O'Casey lived still stands—No. 18, second house in street at right. The boys play hurley, similar to hockey, which O'Casey too played 60 years ago.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. O'Casey's flat looks from the rear toward St. Barnabas' church whose rectors were his friends. British gunfire from this steeple in 1916 came close to killing dramatist and his mother.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesIreland, 1954.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Honored grave is that of Charles Parnell whose fight for Irish freedom inspired O'Casey by its fervid patriotism. 'Where your dust lies,' he wrote, 'will be a . . . living place forever.'Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Woman downstairs appears in many O'Casey plays. O'Casey's real-life woman downstairs was kindly Katie Kenna who stood by him in tragic days and is still at 18 Abercorn Road.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSean O'Casey, 1954.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Scene of play in actual life was room where O'Casey lived with Mullin. It is still much as it was 34 years ago. Mugs on the table are O'Casey's as are some of books.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. In the play 'Shadow of a Gunman,' Minnie Powell takes bomb bag from Donal Davoren (left) and Seumas Shields to hide them. Captured, she is killed when Irish ambush her captors.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Real life model for the philosophical peddler of the 'Gunman,' Seumas Shields, is Michael Mullin. It was Mullin who kindly offered O'Casey shelter right next to the bomb school.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE.In own role as Donal, O'Casey, who put much of himself into play, declaims in self-recrimination after Minnie is killed: 'Oh, Davoren . . . poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet.'Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSean O'Casey's Ireland, 1954.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSean O'Casey, 1954.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Dry land sailor Michael Moran, Liffey River dockworker, dresses seafaring style although he has never been to sea. This picture might be O'Casey's portrait of the paycock in 'Juno.'Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Two chattererers, snug in a pub, gossip cosily while lowering a pint. They are Mrs. Mary McNally and Mrs. Bridget McDonough, who seem right out of any one of O'Casey's plays.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. A barroom banterer, as embodied in Fluther of 'The Plough,' or Joxer of 'Juno,' is Dublin cabbie Michael Murphy who stands quaffing beer and telling of his adventures as a soldier.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSean O'Casey's Dublin, 1954.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The eternal mother, real heroine in many O'Casey plays, is personified by Esther Mulligan. She could be Juno, careworn but spirited, fighting to keep her children together.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The young girl reaching out for a better life -- the Minnie Powell of 'Gunman' -- can be seen in Dublin girls like Moira Cranwell, a pretty typist in the Radio Eireann office.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Ragged poet who appears often in O'Casey's works lives in the bohemian figure of Brendan Behan who, as Sean did, came from the slums and writes plays, poems and ballads.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. At his typewriter which he bought at 10 shillings a week 30 years ago, O'Casey works over his new book.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Stairway to nowhere once led from dressing rooms to stage at the Abbey Theatre, now burned out. Actors Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood descended them to play O'Casey's roles.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Pathway to nowhere, a tree-lined walk, once led to Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, now leveled. Yeats, Shaw, Synge, O'Casey and the other Irish greats came here to visit.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Under a sunhat, the playwright inspects plants in a garden at Totnes, Devon, which he recently gave up in favor of a flat in the town of Torquay.Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
