If one measures O’Casey’s career as a dramatist from 1920, when the Abbey Theatre rejected his first two plays, until his death in 1964, that career was predominantly developed as an expatriate. From The Silver Tassie onwards, his plays were written in England, where a quarter of them were also staged for the first time. The first O’Casey production in England was Juno and the Paycock, which appeared at London’s Royalty Theatre between 16 November 1925 and 6 March 1926, and then transferred to the Fortune Theatre (for 198 performances in total). This chapter traces London productions of O’Casey’s work, examining the way in which particular works by O’Casey proved amenable to audiences in the English capital.

This chapter examines the ways in which a number of playwrights have found inspiration in the work of O’Casey, and analyses how O’Casey’s themes and dramatic forms can be located in the later work of a range of theatre makers. The chapter examines plays including Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Denis Johnston’s The Scythe and the Sunset, Hugh Leonard’s The Patrick Pearse Motel, Christina Reid’s Joyriders, Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians, and Paula Meehan’s Mrs Sweeney. The chapter also examines non-Irish works that have been influenced by O’Casey, examining the work of Korean playwright Chi-Jin Yoo and the American dramatist Lorraine Hansberry.

O’Casey’s three most famous plays, those of his ‘Dublin Trilogy’, were subtitled as tragedies, yet the playwright had little time for academic theorizing and at one stage declared Aristotle was ‘all balls’. Early critics tended to set aside O’Casey’s definitions of his three famous plays as tragedy, preferring terms such as ‘tragi-comedy’, and, aside from Rónán McDonald, most later critics have ignored the issue. This chapter does not start from a specific formal model of tragedy, but instead examines The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars to see how the audience or reader’s experience of these plays might relate to tragedy.

In the context of the appalling inter-communal violence and killings of Northern Ireland during the 1970s, Seamus Deane felt dismayed by those who found parallels between that situation and O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy. For Deane, O’Casey’s most famous works subject political ideologies to hostile scrutiny, whilst offering a form of sentimental humanism as the norm of the ‘ordinary’ people. This chapter examines how the views that Deane expressed about O’Casey fitted with Deane’s broader thinking about politics and society, and shows how Deane provided a telling critique that proved influential for O’Casey’s reputation, as well as for Irish literary and cultural studies more widely.

There is a strong case to be made for defining the early plays of the Dublin Trilogy as a series. A series is a sequence of related texts, and these texts occupy two states simultaneously: independence and interaction. The associated term ‘seriality’ describes the state of interaction between serial texts, and reflections on the operations of ‘seriality’ have emerged from a range of academic disciplines. This chapter examines O’Casey’s most famous writings in the context of serial narrative, serial publication, and serial consumption.