Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Europe in the mid-19th century experienced widespread political upheaval. The Revolutions of 1848, which swept across France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, demanded political reform and national self-determination. While most of these revolts failed in the short term, they exposed tensions between conservative monarchies and the bourgeoisie, who pushed for […]
Seán O’Casey was the first English-speaking dramatist of international significance to emerge from the proletariat. One of the recurring themes in his work is that of revolution. While in his early Dublin plays he controversially considered the Irish working class not yet ready for revolutionary change, his later works explore […]
Seán O’Casey—the first proletarian dramatist writing in English—made his theme the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people and, by extension, of all working people. In Ireland, O’Casey is (unfairly) best known for his first three plays, examining the Irish working class at crucial moments of history. The Shadow […]
Sean O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman premiered 100 years ago, on April 12, 1923, at the Abbey Theatre. It is set during the War of Independence in a Dublin tenement. Davoren, writer of romantic verse, shares a room with Seumas, a peddler and onetime patriot who has now […]
The immediate social background to George Bernard Shaw’s most famous comedy, Pygmalion (1912), is the growing British women’s suffrage movement at the time. The play is as much about class relations as it is about women’s rights. For Shaw, the two are inseparable. Pygmalion is about practical, intelligent women from […]
Sean O’Casey’s dark comedy Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949) is set in Ireland about 1940 and is rarely performed. Witchcraft is haunting the village of Nyadnanave ever since Marthraun’s daughter by his first wife, Loreleen, arrived from London. A rooster causes commotion and embodies indomitable joie de vivre and rebelliousness. The setting in the backwoods suggests […]
As we mark the 150th anniversary of the French proletariat’s heroic first attempt to set up La Commune in Paris, let us examine Bertolt Brecht’s interpretation of this great event in his play The Days of the Commune. The Commune broke out spontaneously on 18 March 1871. War with Germany, hardship, […]