Yeats was an important – if sometimes ambivalent – early supporter of O’Casey. As co-director of the Abbey, Yeats played an important part in first getting O’Casey’s Dublin writing to the stage and in defending that work from critics. Yet, although the Abbey had fostered O’Casey’s talents, W. B. Yeats led his fellow directions in rejecting O’Casey’s 1928 work The Silver Tassie in a way that had a major impact both upon O’Casey’s career and upon the Abbey Theatre’s own history. This chapter interrogates the relationship between O’Casey and Yeats, which is inextricably bound to central tensions at the heart of the early years of the Abbey Theatre.

Between 1975 and 1992, David Krause edited and then published a comprehensive set of O’Casey’s letters that had not been published before. This chapter focuses on O’Casey’s inventiveness as a letter writer, and shows how he includes a wide and sometimes contradictory assortment of voices in order to make his correspondence vibrant and engaging. Letter-writing enabled O’Casey to project his moods and opinions to recipients who knew him in specific contexts, and such writing reveals his fascinating reactions to public and private events. This chapter addresses the use which O’Casey made of letters, and the complex image of the man which emerges from them.

Sean O’Casey based himself in London between 1926 and 1938, and this chapter examines the cultural life of interwar London during O’Casey’s time there. London’s theatre world had long been an important destination for Irish playwrights, and this section of the book establishes the kind of expectations and tastes that O’Casey encountered when he arrived here from Dublin. The chapter explores O’Casey’s interaction with the English capital’s culture and society, and shows how the move to the English capital shaped O’Casey’s social views as well as the subject and form of his writing.