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Introduction
- By James Moran
Edited by James Moran, University of Nottingham
Book:

Sean O'Casey in Context

Published online:

23 June 2025

Print publication:

10 July 2025, pp 1-6
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Summary

This chapter introduces the volume, explaining how O’Casey’s work has been widely read at school and university level, and frequently performed on the stage. The introduction points out that few major studies of O’Casey have been published in recent years, and argues that, by contrast with writers such as Joyce and Yeats, O’Casey is in need of updated critical reframing.

Edited by James Moran
Published online:

23 June 2025

Print publication:

10 July 2025
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Sean O'Casey is one of Ireland's best-known writers. He is the most frequently performed playwright in the history of the Irish National Theatre, and his work is often revived onstage elsewhere. O'Casey is also widely studied in schools, colleges, and universities in the English-speaking world. This book offers a new contextualisation of this famous writer's work, revisiting his association with Irish nationalism, historical revisionism, and celebrated contemporaries such as W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. The volume also brings O'Casey's work into contact with topics including disability studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, and race. Sean O'Casey in Context explores a number of existing ideas about O'Casey in the light of new academic developments, and updates our understanding of this important writer by taking into account recent scholarly thinking and a range of theatrical productions from around the globe.

Chapter 8 - Adaptations: Commemoration and Contemporary Irish Theatre
from Part II - Spaces
- By James Moran
Edited by Eric Falci, University of California, Berkeley, Paige Reynolds, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
Book:

Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020

Published online:

28 February 2020

Print publication:

12 March 2020, pp 152-167
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, has appeared onstage at the Abbey theatre between 1991 and 2016. The chapter shows how these four versions of O’Casey’s script navigate a set of contemporary concerns, from historical revisionism, through the Celtic Tiger boom, to the economic crash, and into the era when various kinds of institutional and state abuse have been revealed. Shifts in performance style also reveal changes in thinking about theatrical form in Ireland and help illuminate the role of the Irish national theatre during a period when other nearby national theatres have come to operate in profoundly different ways.