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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - The Second World War

  • from Part I - Key Places and Events
  • Edited by James Moran, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    Sean O'Casey in Context
    Published online:
    23 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025, pp 45-56

  • Summary

    O’Casey was a great writer of war, and he wrote a great deal during the Second World War when he lived in England, although much of this work has failed to find a place in the theatrical repertoire. This chapter focuses on the two wartime plays set during the war: the comic Purple Dust (1940), about two Englishmen moving to Ireland to escape the conflict; and the tragic Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), set during the Battle of Britain. This chapter shows how the geopolitics of the Second World War, combined with O’Casey’s complex political affiliations and a heightened anxiety about Irish masculinity, placed O’Casey in a position from which he found it difficult to speak.