This chapter reflects on Sean O’Casey’s work from a postcolonial critical perspective. The focus is firstly upon his early Abbey plays, especially The Plough and the Stars, which are shown to be significant for postcolonial criticism because of their content, the contexts of their initial Abbey productions, and the ways that key aspects of their critical history play outsized roles in framing understandings of the postcolonial critical endeavour. The chapter shows how O’Casey responded to the political complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary era of the 1910s and 1920s. The chapter then examines O’Casey’s later plays, showing how his responses to the revolutionary era evolved as he dealt directly with postcolonial Ireland and the fascism of the 1930s–1960s.

From 1926, O’Casey became well known as a critic of Irish nationalism. Some commentators felt that the playwright presented a grotesque distortion of historical events, and a slander on those men who had died for Ireland, including Patrick Pearse. This chapter examines O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey’s relationship with Pearse, and the dramatist’s prose history The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). We see how Irish nationalism changed during the first half of O’Casey’s life, and the way in which his attitude to nationalism also altered, with this chapter making the case that the relation between O’Casey and Irish nationalism was far more shifting and nuanced than has often been perceived.