Seize Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow Of A Gunman / Juno And The Paycock / The Plough And The Stars Drafted By Seán OCasey Digital Copy

OCasey is, duh, an excellent playwright, Although sometimes it was just him telling what happened and not getting under the drama,

I absolutely loved re reading Juno and the Paycock, Great characters, made me think about wealth, the words flew off the page and I could see it all, By far, the best of the three,

The Shadow of a Gunman was too literal, I was saying this to a friend and he was like is it the snakes on a plane of Irish plays why are all this mutha fucking gunmen in these mutha fucking shadows.
It was like a history play, It depends a lot on staging,

The Plough and the Stars again was like a history play, Better characters than Shadow, but there were three characters I kept getting mixed up because they werent drawn that well, I loved the Dublin way of writing Bourwaazee! Powst! and I liked Noras character, But again, the dramah wasnt right, Again Id need to see it staged, These three tragicomedies wonderfully evoke the lives of tenementdwellers in the Dublin of a century ago, The plays show how the great political events of their time, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, bring suffering and tragedy to the characters.
OCaseys stage directions are so precise and extensive, describing not only the stage sets, but also the appearance and characters of the protagonists, that I found I could read the plays almost as short novels.
Three plays on Dublin set during the Irish Rebellion of the mid's, Written in dialect, so can be slow reading I used the dictionary and my Irish husband to decode some the slang, Descriptive, emotional, and true to the time period, I read these plays in anticipation of a trip to NYC to see all three of the plays at the Irish Repertory in May,Plays set at various stages of the upheaval that gripped Ireland between, Each play features predominantly working class characters and depicts the struggles, conflicts and contradictions of their lives in an increasingly schismatic society,

Shadow of a Gunman set induring the Irish War of Independence, A poet named Donal Davoren has moved to a Dublin tenement slum where he rooms with Seamus a peddlar, The residents of the tenement believe him to be a "gunman" i, e. an IRA soldier on the run from British authorities, hiding out and laying low in the tenements, Davoren does not dissuade them from this notion, enjoying somewhat vainly the renown of this fugitive persona, especially when it garners attention from Minnie Powell, a young and beautiful tenement resident.
Events take a tragic turn when the tenement is raided by the Black amp Tans, and the residents discover the contents of a bag dropped off earlier by Seamus' 'business associate'.


Juno and the Paycock set inshortly after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, The play details the various misfortunes of the Boyle familylayabout drunken father "Captain" Boyle The "paycock" who gets pains in his legs at the mention of getting a job, long suffering mother Juno who struggles to keep the family together, their son Johnny a debilitated IRA soldier who fears reprisals from an act of betrayal, and daughter Mary, who misjudges the character of a love interest and ends up abandoned and pregnant.
Like the other plays in this trilogy there is plenty of humour, but this is the bleakest and most miserable of the three,

The Plough and the Stars The most fully realised, well balanced, and best, of the trilogy a near perfect blend of comedy and tragedy, The first two acts are set inamid growing nationalist fervour, and the second two acts are set during the Easter Rising of, It's characters are battlers and working class discontents of various shades, The play neither glorifies for vilifies it simply casts an eye over the conflicting viewpoints of the everyday people caught up in the tumult of the events that, at the time, were met with confusion in some quarters and revulsion in others, but were later to become nationdefining.
very antirepublican They are all tragedies, so you know that all that wrong people are going to die by the end, but these are great, Lots of laughs, tears, song, and alcohol, Working class characters, but there's no whitewashing them, they are as ugly as they want to be, . . I guess this stuff is social realism like Gorky or something but it doesn't seem too heavy handed, . . until of course all the wrong people die, But actually, if they had lived, you'd think it was corny, so in the end, these are perfect and probably something people will be reading and hopefully performing centuries from now.
I plan to read more by this guy, read, yesand cast in “Juno” Repertory Philippines, Manila read: juno and the paycock, also saw the hitchcock filmwhich is great, although kinda hard to understand because it's one of his first talking pictures, seriously.

juno's good. it's funny and interesting and, like all good plays, the last scenes knock you out, plus, there's tons of info about irish history so i really dig that on a personal level, Three delightful plays,

hardhitting, controversial then as now, O'Casey's slightly Gaelicized dialog reveal's the plays' characters in all their strengths and faults, the latter being quite well represented, All the plays' actions are in the period of the Irish struggle of independence from England, the late teens and earlys of the last century, The play The Plough and the Stars was hugely controversial, a reflection of the intranecine rivalries among the Irish independence movements, This play actually caused riots outside the Abbey Theater in Dublin in, and O'Casey was so disgusted by the protests he left Ireland for Devon, England, never to return to Ireland.
I highly recommend for those interested in Irish history and great plays, Im not quite sure why OCasey is often considered in the same league as Yeats, Synge and Shaw, I think the content of these plays is far more interesting than their form, and it is great to have a play like The Plough and the Stars with its finger on the pulse of history, providing an almost firsthand experience of the Easter Rising.
But although the representation of dialect is realistic, they fail to convince me as realistic dramas, . . they might approach melodrama. My favourite would probably be Juno and the Paycock which has a tight construction and overlapping of plots, I loved the way how Sean O'Casey braked the traditional portrayal of women, The diction he used in his plays took me tos Ireland, Good but hard to get through, helped to take an online class, Irish tragicomedy, a characteristic particular to the Irish character, Sean O'Casey belonged to the working class and here in these plays captures three Dublin families during the Irish Civil War, It's a fascinating look, and because it's in play form seems almost like listening in at a space in a time long gone, The characters are interesting and we simultaneously feel sorry and annoyed, It's especially tragic the Irish would have turned in on themselves after such a long run of horrors inflicted by the English, I also enjoyed the scene sets when O'Casey writes freely, one can see the poet in him and he paints clear wonderful pictures of his characters, Three early plays by Sean O'Caseyarguably his three greatestdemonstrate vividly O'Casey's ability to convey the reality of life and the depth of human emotion, specifically in Dublin before and during the Irish civil war of, but, truly, throughout the known universe.


In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement dwellers in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in The Plough and the Stars, Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings.


As Seamus Heaney has written, "O'Casey's characters are both down to earth and larger than life, . . His democratic genius was at one with his tragic understanding, and his recoil from tyranny and his compassion for the oppressed were an essentialas opposed to a moral and thematicpart of his art.
" Good examples of earlyth century Irish theatre, A force d'avoir lu beacoup de livres angloCanadiens et Quebecois, je sais tres bien ce qui est une litterature regionale, Les littératures anglocanadienne et quebecoise sont des littératures regionales des ÉtatsUnis, La litterature Irlandaise est une litterature specifique a une ile dans l'archipel Britannique, Comme les deux littératures de mon pays, la litterature irlandaise est de tres grande qualité mais qui s'occupe souvent des questions profondement insulaire,

Cependant ces pieces qui sont plats a lire prennent tout a fait un autre allure quand elles sont interpretes par des acteurs de talent, Je conseille aux francais de monter sur un traversier avec leurs vehicles afin de faire une promenade en Irlande, Si vous faites bien vos plans vous devez etre en mesure d'assister a une representation d'un de ces pieces a l'Abbey Theatre de Dublin qui est un des tres grands theatres du monde Anglophone.
Des acteurs tels que le Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan et Saorise Ronan ont tous passé par l'Abbey Theatre, Bon voyage. .