Sean O'Casey on the Absurdity of War: The Sliver Tassie

1IRA FACIT POETAM – a saying which applies to Sean O'Casey as well as its reversal: POETA FACIT IRAM. O'Casey has been controversial from the time when he took his pen as a weapon to fight for Ireland's freedom, for which he chose the stage in the first place. He did not fight for a freedom that exhausted itself in the attainment of Ireland's political independence – even though this was undoubtedly one of his foremost alms, in the same way as it was the aim of the numerous Irish nationalist movements of his time.

2We cannot make out any trace of patriotism in his plays, as arose from remembered cultural Ideals of the past, nor do we meet in them with that spirit of heroic Celticism which, under the grip of British colonialism neither dead nor alive, was to be revived and to resurrect in the symbolic character of the pure and flawlessly beautiful Kathleen ni Houlihan.

3The avantgardist theatre which produced O'Casey's first plays articulated a profounder national desire, born of the conviction that the glorification of the past – important as it may be as an initial step towards national identity – was nothing but a romantic illusion, unless It operated directly for the weal of the forming nation.

4Of all the playwrights writing for the Abbey Theatre, it was O'Casey who stated that the weal of the nation depends primarily on social Justice. Unless this was granted in Ireland, the people would remain in a state of spiritual dependence which, after all, would be more oppressive than the political one.

5The road to freedom leads through crises that develop from the confrontation with one's own harsh reality. Not always were the Abbey authors successful in their attempts to open up the eyes of the public and to sharpen their senses for the perception of their true problems. Often enough the majority of the Irish sought refuge behind their absolute trinity of taboos: Religion, Sexuality and Patriotism, pouring their wrath onto those who lashed out against Ignorance, bigotry and complacency, onto those who tried to rouse pity and compassion. Thus James Joyce uses the image of the old sow eating her farrow, in order to denote his country's hysteric aggressiveness towards its geniuses.

6The journalist and author Gerard Pay, son of the renowned Abbey actor Frank Fay, recalls O'Casey's remark: "People get It all wrong about why my own countrymen dislike me and some hate me. It has to do with Irish politics, with world politics, but as often as not with religion."1 In each of the three factors O'Casey recognized a vast field of action for the cardinal vice Injustice. Not only did he direct his pen against it – he withstood it with all his personality. Juno's imploring words at the end of Juno and the Paycock. "Sacred Heart o' Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone, and give us Thine eternal love!"2 mark the author's own imploration, pointing out, at the same time, the only way of escape from this "terrible state o' chassis" that man as an individual, group, nation, or species, has manoeuvred himself Into.

7Still, Juno's prayer does not voice the pious and passive attitude which makes us "cast all our sorrow unto the Lord". O'Casey considers the argument "since God looks after the wild flowers, how much more will he care for you"3 a "pathetic lie"4, and continues: "Of course he does nothing of the kind, and wild flowers have to damn well fend for themselves, as we have to do, too, though with the flowers it is an everlasting right for existence, with us, now, it is a perpetual struggle towards educational and social development."5 With great decisiveness and intensity O'Casey calls in question passive piety that may ask in Juno's and Mrs. Tancred's words: "Blessed Virgin, where were you, when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"6.

8It is we alone who bear the responsibility for our weal and woe, and we must, in every respect, dedicate ourselves to the weal in order to fend off the woe – this is the core of O'Casey's message conveyed to us in his plays.

9Its guide and incentive are the analysis of historical developments on one hand, and passion-born utopia on the other, thus bearing up the basic idea of Marx with whom O'Casey first became acquainted when reading The Capital. O'Casey considered himself a "born Communist"7, but his artistry, resulting from the unorthodox mind of a genius that rejects being constrained by rigid systems, kept him from joining the Communist Party. Nevertheless, it had his spiritual support.

10A hopeful future of mankind is not dependent upon the setting up of new principles, but upon the perception and realization of perennial truths. "Communism isn't an invention of Marx", O'Casey says, "it is social growth, developing through the ages, since man banded together to fight fear of the unknown, and destroy the danger of mammoth and tiger of the sabre-tooth. All things of science and art are in its ownership, since man painted the images of what he saw on the wall of his cave, and since man put on the wooden share of his plough the more piercing power of iron and bronze."8

11Besides the spiritual Influence of Keats, Shelley, Blake, Burns, Emerson, Whitman and Ruskin, besides support and practical aid from G.B. Shaw, two personalities helped to shape O'Casey's conception of communism: Christ, and the "Prometheus of Dublin", the Labour Leader Jim Larkin, a radical socialist, in whom his Catholic countrymen smelled the incarnation of the Anti-Christ.

12"God and religion before everything. God and religion before the world !", cries out fanatic Dante in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.9 She may be taken to stand for those whose religion is in truth godless and inhumane – in O'Casey's plays targets of his scornful criticism. Mr. Casey rises against Dante in fiery rage: "No God for Ireland!... We have had too much God in Ireland! Away with God!"10 Quoting G.B. Shaw. O'Casey says of himself with a twinkle: "I'm an atheist, thank God"11, but his humour hides his moral scorn which is as material as that of the Joycian Mr. Casey.

13Asked when he had actually lost his faith, O'Casey answered: "I never lost my faith, I round it, round it when Jim Larkin came to Dublin... I round it in Jim's great socialist motto: 'An injury to one is the concern of all'"12; and on another occasion he adds: "I am against any system that does not grant every man and every woman access to the gifts of the universe."13 To him the significance of the Red Star of Communism is identical with the Star of Bethlehem, both being connected with the planet Earth. Christ stands for man suffering from man. At the same time, Christ symbolizes man who, by his "eternal love" for Mankind and Lire, frees himself from the powers of "murdherin' hate". From these two poles we may develop a dialectic view of lire which is also transferable to O'Casey's personal biography: man frees himself from misery and suffering and, In doing so, he by force must suffer.

14Liberation and justice cannot be achieved by gentleness. Shortly before his death O'Casey said in conversation: "The first thing a fella has to do if he wants to accomplish anything of value is to be tactless... Christ wasn't very tactful, was He? Let's race up to it, He was a great public nuisance, always stirring things up, always telling people what they should and shouldn't do, and so few of them ever listening to Him, and He had to shout it out again and again. Was He polite and submissive? Was He afraid to speak out? All for one and one for All, that's what He preached, and He was a great communist."14

15If O'Casey, towards the end of the eighty-Tour years of his lire, once again asserted that the practical realization of life-furthering values demanded the courage to be tactless, even to declare war on egotistic group – or class – interests, it only proves his personal fulfilment and success. Yet prophets do not go unpunished. O'Casey had to suffer permanent poverty.

16Even though he put the artistic value of a drama before his political Intention, he nevertheless held that all art takes its origin from the artist's personal point of view. This conviction led him into difficulties of which the immediate reaction of the London theatre director Sir Barry Jackson, on reading the script of The Silver Tassie, may be an example. Calling on O'Casey he said: "You have written a fine 'play, a terrible play I An impossible play for me. I dare not put it on. ... An English audience couldn't stand it. ... The play would lacerate our feelings, it would be unbearable!"15

17O'Casey's attcks on principles that were actually life-denying, appeared unbearable to many another audience between Dublin and Boston, USA, for, according to the Irish playwright and contemporary of O'Casey's.Denis Johnston, Ireland's disease did not afflict Ireland alone, but the entire world.

18Nevertheless, in 1926, O'Casey had been awarded the Hawthornden Literary Prize of £ 100 for June and the Paycock. given annually for the best play by a so far unknown author. O'Casey had travelled to London for its reception. Meanwhile, a series of incidents had made him aware of the fact that he no longer really felt at home in Ireland, neither as a person, nor as an artist. In the part of his Autobiographies, entitled Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, he recalls: "It was time for Sean to go. He had enough of it. He would no more be an exile in another land than he was in his own."16 He had entered his adult life as a worker who was politically engaged; after that he had been both worker and poet. From now on he was to be nothing but a poet, one with keen political awareness, a poet of the working class. Circumstances and last but not least, his love for the young Irish actress Eileen Reynolds Carey, whom he married in the following year, confirmed O'Casey in his decision to stay in London. It was the beginning of a lifelong exile, a fate which he shared with so many other Irish artists.17

19The Abbey Theatre, with Yeats as its dominant director, was anxious not to lose its successful author "who had come to the Abbey when he had been most needed"18, saving it from further financial difficulties. In the spring of 1928 O'Casey sent Yeats the script or The Silver Tassie. Connections with Dublin seemed to continue.

20In W.B. Yeats and Sean O'Casey two personalities met who, as to their social backgrounds, temperaments and artistic conceptions, were opposite poles. However, reducing their differences to the oppositive pair of patrician-proletarian would be an illicit simplification. Despite the controversy that flared up between the two men on Yeats's rejection or The Silver Tassie (between O'Casey, whose plays would be forgotten in fifty years, as some of his critics claimed, and the literary authority and Nobel Prize winner Yeats), their mutual respect never subsided. Both considered each other men in whom thought and action were in unshakable accord. They also shared the conviction that great art is neither created by, nor for the multitude. They differed, though, in that O'Casey took the subject-matter of his plays from real lire. He depicted the human condition through an artistic fusion or reality and fantasy, both of which he considered necessary factors in the social development. On the other hand, Yeats's idea of the function of drama culminated in a complete detachment from the realities or human existence.

21Intending to establish a theatre that was to be unimpeded by commercial calculations, Yeats had conceived the Abbey from the beginning as an experimental theatre. Discovering the originally ritual Noh-Plays of medieval Japan which were highly formalized according to certain aesthetic principles, he round a way of realizing his dramatical theory which aimed at a sort of anti-theatre : a poetic seance of an elected circle of kindred spirits, an aristocracy of art that experienced its moment of mystical fulfilment in the identification with the absolute form of beauty – all this at the very time when the national pride that Yeats himself had helped to stir up, bore its abortive and fatal fruit. In the Easter Rising and, later, in the Civil War, passion, banned from Yeats's plays, turned Ireland into a stage of bloody drama.

22O'Casey, too, was searching for new, unconventional means of dramatic expression, yet not in order to find a way from the "lower spheres of life" to the far-off realm of intransient beauty, but to illustrate a world, in which suffering and beauty – a different conception of beauty, though – are in a dynamic correlation. "Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm, all along, out along, out along, lea. A laugh is a loud echo of a sigh, a sigh the faint echo of a laugh."19

23Yet, driven by egotism and illusion, tragedy at times accelerates her pace. Then laughter lags behind, turns bitter, dies down. The sighs become stronger, ringing with agony of soul and body. Thus O'Casey felt when, with The Silver Tassie he turned to the subject of the immense tragedy of World War. In retrospect of his conception of the play he writes in his Autobiographies: "He would show a wide expanse of war in the midst of timorous hope and overweening fear... silently show the garlanded horror of war... the ruin, the squeal of the mangled, the softening moan of the badly rended are horrible, be the battle just or unjust, be the fighters striving for the good or manifesting faith in evil."20

24In his preceding plays produced by the Abbey, O'Casey had reversed the traditional patriarchic view of heroism, presenting it with ironic Jocundity, or bitter sarcasm, the technique of realism, however, still serving as an apt way of expression. With the new theme – the consequences of man's murderous potentials which were beyond all common sense – O'Casey needed a new form of dramatic communication. His Juxtaposition of realistic and parabolical elements developed naturally from his subject-matter and was not, as he himself affirms, an intended adaptation of expressionistic devices.21 However, with his affinity to the works of Strindberg, Toller, and O'Neill among others, O'Casey found essential stimulation in their techniques of expressionism and surrealism. His new symbolic play had been written in that spirit of experiment which, in 1904, Yeats had declared the fundament of the new Irish Theatre, promising an artistic freedom which was, in Yeats's words, "not found in theatres in England, and without which no new movement of art or literature can succeed."22 Therefore it is much the more astonishing that "the usually competent Yeats", in spite of "his marksmanship"... "fired so very wide"23 when rejecting The Silver Tassie. The question, what caused his severe judgment, cannot be answered exhaustively. Yeats was said to be somehow jealous of his successful "apprentice" whom he had thought to "create in his own image". Not only did The Silver Tassie not conform to the Yeatsian theory of drama – it even opposed it. In 1936, three years before his death, Yeats still upheld his thesis that, if war was after all unavoidable, one should try to overcome and forget its sufferings, in the same way as one forgot the pangs of an illness, once it subsided – an opinion which is shared neither by O'Casey, nor by O'Casey's great educator Shakespeare24, whose 'Negative Capability' made him "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason."25 Yeats's evaluation of suffering is different to O'Casey's. Regarding suffering as mere passivity, he seeks to ban it from the mind, from that of the artist in particular. Suffering cannot be a subject to the dramatist, war "must not obtrude itself upon the stage" as an overwhelming power that will not "burn In the fire of dramatic action".26 Its function may only be that of wall paper: serving as "mere background".

25Hurt and upset, yet with unbroken self-confidence, O'Casey revealed Yeats's arguments as raise and unjust27, though he was not able to convince all critics and least of all Yeats himself. The controversy completed O'Casey's estrangement from his native country, since, in his Judgment, the Abbey could no longer be a medium of his art. When, some time later, O'Casey was presented an opportunity for retaliation, he positively declined to make use of it; his conviction and integrity made him turn against Yeats's enemies as it had made him turn against Yeats himself. When the latter, in connection with his rejection of The Silver Tassie. had made an embarrassing suggestion to O'Casey, which would have meant a foul concession, a "lousy perversion of truth"28, O'Casey countered: "Does he think that I would practise in my life the prevarication and wretchedness that I laugh at in my plays?"29

26The rejection of the play hampered O'Casey's recognition as an artist, for – as he put it in The Rose and Crown – "almost all the literary grandees would, naturally, be on the side of Yeats, and most of the press that mattered, would directly or indirectly make a bow to his decision."30 The rejection also meant material disaster. O'Casey and his young family, being entirely dependent on the royalties from the plays, were deprived of their income and cast to the verge of subsistence. The publisher Daniel Macmillan (the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan counted among O'Casey's personal friends) was impressed by the play, and so was O'Casey's London agent C.B. Cochran. Macmillan's published it in June 1928, one year before it had its première at the Apollo Theatre in London, produced by Raymond Massey. Consenting to Massey's interpretation of the play, O'Casey then wrote a stage version, which contained a number of minor alterations31) and which was included in O'Casey's Collected Plays.

27Only six years later, in 1935, Yeats gave a sign of reconciliation. He allowed a production at the Abbey Theatre, but it had only two performances, which were accompanied by the usual reactions: the audience as well as the critics were scandalized. This echo obviously testified the desire to submerge unpleasant realities mirrored by the play.

28Over the following years and decades The Silver Tassie had several productions in Ireland and abroad, still meeting with scorn and condemnation, even causing uproar, as did the performance at the Schiller Theatre, under the direction of Fritz Kortner, on 20 June, 1953, when the audience was still under the Impression of the workers' rebellion in East Berlin.

29The horror of World War II had not led to a better understanding of O'Casey's appellant anti-war play. To those who believed in war heroism, it meant a defilement of the soldier, an attempt to render him ridiculous. To those that called for an unrelenting policy of power in the conflict between East and West, it appeared as an expression of sentimental, illusionary and defiable pacifism.

30Producers all over the world have proved unable to cope with "O'Casey's tragi-comical rhythm and the constantly changing moods of his characters."32 In her article on 'The Critical Reception of Sean O'Casey since 1953', Regine Heidenreich-Krawschak criticizes the fact that even the competent producer Peter Zadek, in his 1968 production of The Silver Tassie, "restricted his vision to the funny side of the war." Although he did so "in order to expose its absurdity", she rinds it "debatable if Zadek's version... added anything to the better understanding or O'Casey."33 The intellect may find the idea of war an absurdity, yet the idea may change into horrible reality. O'Casey's play contains both aspects, that or intellectual absurdity, and of the absurd reality of senseless and infinite destruction. Yet O'Casey's main interest is always in real lire. Life bears the double aspect or bitterness and joy, but joy is Lire's great motor. There may be comedy in the tragic and tragedy in the comic. This dialectic vision can also be referred to laughter itself. "A laughter", O'Casey says, "tends to mock the pompous and pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead."34 As a "weapon against evil", "laughter is brought in to mock things as they are so that they may topple down and make room for better things to come. ... The bigger the subject, the sharper the laugh." Only those who are able to take life with a laugh are able to take life seriously.

31"He drank to life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!"35, are the final words of O'Casey's Autobiography, which is the testimony of a life full of toll and trouble. The conviction that "once we can laugh, we can live"36 helped O'Casey to accept life's challenges and to stand its absurdities.

32Ignorance and folly have never stopped harassing the world. O'Casey may be understood as another "Voice in the Wilderness", particularly at a time when man is about to devastate his entire planet. "The horror at the discovery that, continuing in our present direction, we are heading towards a final catastrophe must confirm our decision to return ... For the first time it is man alone who holds the power over his future in his own hands, for the first time, it is man who navigates the spaceship Earth on his voyage through the coming centuries. His responsibility is so great that his task is both challenge and burden."37 These words of the President of the Club of Rome, Aurelio Peccei, signalize an awakening consciousness which gives new actuality to O'Casey's words and warnings. The destructive potentials of modern weapons are beyond imagination. The world's "terrible state o' chassis" might become irreversible, as Harry Heegan's Silver Tassie, the "symbol of youth, of power and victory"38 assumed the meaning of loss and defeat.