Three Dublin Plays

Three early plays by Sean O'Casey--arguably his three greatest--demonstrate vividly O'Casey's ability to convey the reality of life and the depth of human emotion, specifically in Dublin before and during the Irish civil war of 1922-23, but, truly, throughout the known universe. <br><br>In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement dwellers in <i>The Shadow of a Gunman</i> and <i>Juno and the Paycock</i> to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in <i>The Plough and the Stars</i>, Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings. <br><br>As Seamus Heaney has written, "O'Casey's characters are both down to earth and larger than life . . . His democratic genius was at one with his tragic understanding, and his recoil from tyranny and his compassion for the oppressed were an essential--as opposed to a moral and thematic--part of his art."