Creative Person; 20; Sean O'Casey

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . As a playwright, I have received knocks on the snout when the hair was brown and the face young looking, and I'm still getting them. When I'm old and grey and full of tears, well

not quite full of tears. For within me the laugh comes and goes and always comes again. Well, one can hit back and land at times. Many a Gregorian slash and blow on the conk of him who tries to trip, are on one who aims a blow below the belt. Well, the only retort to a boo is a bat. They may relive this life from the hour I began it. I found it a life full of kindness and bliss. But until they can show me some happier planet, more social and kind, I'll pretend to me with this. That song was written by the Irish player I, Chano Casey. For the use of a character in one of his later plays, Purple Dust, a four man stone mason named O'Kiligan, who has, as the author, had a pretty rough life, giving him a great deal of confidence in himself, and read widely strengthening that confidence. Now, it may be that O'Kiligan sings for O'Kacy,

who had a pretty rough life, and read widely, and had a great deal of confidence in himself. A confidence that spilled onto the pages, he wrote, and lasted him 85 years of life. In late days, there were hours that dared that confidence to endure. When the gaunt, spare Dubliner died, on September the 18th, in 1964, he left behind him a wife, much younger, a daughter barely grown, and one son, where they had lately been too. The last hours of that by Neil, filled one of his father's final essays, under a Greenwood tree, he died. So, Doctor in this world could save him. It was just a question of time, and a short time too, his mother hauled in the boy's free hand until the restlessness ceased, till

the boy grew drowsy, and the finely formed hand, and no longer sought a contact with hers. Today, the third of January, Neil's body was cremated. All the plans I made, the thoughts I had to try to live a few more years at least. Then I could lead the way for the family into darkness, after a long, rugged, and exciting journey, a natural scheme for the oldest mind of fashion. But death could down the vigorous young sapling, and left the old, gnarled tree, stand them, left the old, gnarled, withering tree, standing.

Rarely, rarely, did he write of himself as himself by name. But grief and loss brought him closer than ever to the page, like something winged, brought low by an exhausted flame. When Sean O'Casey died, he left for 1,500 pounds, only that in hand for eleven full-length plays, twelve shorter ones, six volumes of autobiography, handful of essays, very few stories and some songs, and a name familiar enough in general mind to be confused with the whole load of other Irish sounding ones. He was Sean O'Casey, born in Dublin as John Casey, and altered in nationalistic fervor to the Gaelic, Sean O'Casey, then later half

retrieved into now the Belanglish as Sean O'Casey, the playwright, and if three were names weren't enough, in the autobiographies he calls himself Johnny Cassidy, always remembering. Remembering his first day at school so long before, his eyes half blind and always threatening had even then been diseased and painful. Long then John, you might as well be at school, as to be at home, bore in your eyes out, looking at the pictures in the books your poor father left behind him, besides your poor father would be unhappy in heaven, thinking of his little boy growing up to be nothing but a dunce. Well, welcome to the bright little new scholar director told me about. Oh, don't be afraid of the boy. Why, see, it's not such a terrible thing, is it? Only as a delicate boy, and must be treated gently because of his poor eyes.

Oh, he chastised the boy's only one, it's necessary. Now, you're off with him, my good woman, and give thanks to God that your boy will be where he can share and what would be for his own good. The teacher had said that the Richter told him about Johnny Cassidy. Now, this tells us that Johnny Cassidy, Sean O'Casey, was a Protestant, which wasn't very rare in Belfast, perhaps, but in North Dublin, they were virtually extinct. An outsider, frequently with a siled, catchy bandage over his bad eye and a squint against the sun in his good one, he somehow grew to manhood. Working as a newspaper starter, a dock worker, a hard carrier, stone break around the roads, whatever was to be had in a time when there was little to be had.

In 1920, Labour, Sean O'Casey then wanting to be called Sean O'Casey, lived in a house in Mount Jai Street, with a friend Michael Mullen, he shared one room, a room that found its way onto the Abbey Theatre stage on the night of April in 1923, in the first play that O'Casey had put on the shadow of a gunman. In Donald Dabern and his friend speak about the loadsome futility of war, they weren't mouthing Ayambic pentameter about an ancient combat. They were speaking the plain truth about a Dublin war just a few years gone. And there were people in the Abbey audience who still felt the trap of wounds incurred in Henry Street and O'Casey Street. It's very quiet out now. I wonder what time it is.

The village cock had priced on salutation to the morn. Shakespeare wretched the third act, five scene three. A peaceful heavens looked now with the moon in the middle of life. I wouldn't think there are men prowling about trying to shoot each other. I don't know how any man worked with the shot anyone can sleep in a piece at night. That's plenty of men can't sleep in a piece at night, no, unless they know that they have shot somebody. I wish they got it was over. The country's gone mad. Instead of counting their beads, they're counting their bullets. Their partner, Nastas, and Harold Marys, have turned into a burst in bombs. First in bombs in the rattle of machine guns, petrol is their holy water. Their masses are burned and built in. The day performances, the soldier's song, the creed is, I believe, and the gunner might he make of heaven and earth, and all for the glory of God in the honor of Ireland. I remember the time when you yourself believed in nothing but the gun.

I mean, it wasn't a gun in the country, or it was a different opinion now that there's nothing but guns in the country. It's the civilians who suffer, when there's an ambush, they don't know what to run. It's bullet in the back to say the British Empire shot and the press to say the soul of Ireland. Well, I believe that Ireland should be free in that the English have no right to be here, but rather line when the gunman are blown about dying for the people, when it's the people who are dying for the gunman, oh, they'll do respect to the gunman. I don't want them to die for me. Not likely. You object to any one of them deliberately dying for you, for fear that one of these days you might accidentally die for one of them. It was a lumpy dish to lay before a people, lately gone through a civil war, but digested they did, and they begged for more.

The more he gave them, took the form of Juno and the Peacock, and he put into it all the feeling he had for the basic nobility of Irish womanhood. Something of his own mother, long dead, and something of the Roman Catholic neighbors that he had. Juno Byle became all Dublin women, trying to hold a family together in the face of poverty, disease, and civil war, and not much help from our husband, Captain Jack Byle, the strutting Peacock of the title, that leased sea-worthy of all un-sea-faring dreamers. We've pulled ourselves together again when I'm working for a few weeks. Haudy, the form of the job is an old buddy of Jaxxers. I have an idea I know of myself, it's an A-number-one shovel-gang job. Say there's a button missing off the back of me moldskin trousers.

Ralph, you just leave out an evil and a thread, I'll sort out myself. Thanks be the god of pain in me legs who's gone anyhow. Look here Mr. Jackie Boyle, then yarns won't go down with Juno. I know you and Jaxxer daily of an hour date, and if you think you're able to come it over me with them fairy tales, you're in the wrong shop, butty or Jaxxers, you'll do a lot of good so long as you continue to be a butty or Jaxxers, a shovel, and then we bore you, you'll do foul more work with a knife and a fork than every you'll do with a shovel. If there was ever a genuine job going, you'd be talking away about, able to lift your arms for the pain in your legs, your poor wife's slave and to keep the bit in your mouth and you. Gala Vanton about all the day, like a peacock. A man would be better off dead, better off dead. Everybody call in your captain, and you only once done the water in an old color from

here to Liverpool, but anyone to listen or to look at you would take you for a second Christ of Oracle on birth, or you're never going to give us any rest. Well, you're never tired of looking for a rest. Do you want to drive me out of the house? Would it be easier to drive you out of the house than to drive you into a job? Sit down and take your breakfast. It might be the last one you're going to get, but I don't know where the next one is going to come. Well, if I get the job, we'll be all right. Woman to Sean O'Casey never lost her dignity and strength. Be she mother or whore, patriot or street arching. And more and more, he lets her speak her mind, which is of course his mind. In the other play that he wrote about religion and sex bedtime story, the subject is sex and religion.

And the scene is a sitting room of a bachelor flat in a boarding house. John Joe Mulligan lives there. Angela Nightingale does not. I can't find it anywhere else here. What? It's going to four in the morning, Angela. Did you get the lipstick? No, no. I told you. I can't see it anywhere. I have another look. There's a deer. I know I left it out there somewhere. It's not exactly a tropical climate out here, you know. It's easy to like the fire, isn't it? Oh, no. I can't like the fire. Oh. The meter needs another shillam. I love to be handbags somewhere is about. Maybe there's a bob in it. Hmm. Huh. You're not going to sleep again, are ya? What time is this? That friend of mine I told you about will be back any minute from us all night dance before you store yourself if you don't hurry and what if he is? Sure, if you knew what had been going on here on night, if he saw it, he ever went in a dance. Hahaha. Look, Angela, I don't see anything funny in it.

We should never have done it. Please face the situation. Remember, you're promised to slip away when things were quiet until like the dark because your dates are equal or what? Switch on the lights. God's sake, man. Let's have a look at each other before you banish your pull or leave from a mulligan paradise. No, I'd be afraid anyone would see it or hear our voices and begin to wonder. Hundreds was at hearing a girl's voice in my room at this hour of the night or morning. I'm listening to the sweet thing to hear a girl's voice in a man's room at this hour of the night or morning. No, no, it's not. You know, it isn't. Situated as we are. You know you did wrong to practice on a body that didn't know enough. Situated as we are without divine warrant. It's not proper. We're in the midst of a violent sin. And you should be ashamed and sorry instead of feeling sinfully gay about it. Ah, you were pretty gay when you were coming in by now, weren't you?

Ah, sure. You've had your few bright moments. You've given a sparkle to your life, but don't spoil it. Come on, Jordan. I'll come back when the room's warmer. Look, myself ready to meet the respectable world. Oh, that one will be well-punished for her gayity and carelessness and sin. Oh, will I ever forget the night's dunes? Shattering fall. The very next day after me, no vina, too. Oh, God, is she going to bed again? Please, please, Miss Nightingale. Have some regard for others, please, please. Oh, my God. A bright slap in the face, that for the Dublin Irish. Sex and religion in the one blow. However, it was a blow they never really had to endure for it was a late play, bedtime story. Written many years after he had exiled himself to life in England. But here is a harsh truth about death for a good cause.

From the second OKC success at the Abbey, Juneau and the Peacock again. But this time, the woman speaking for OKC is not Juneau bile. But a neighbor, Mrs. Tankret. She is on her way to Mercer's hospital to identify the body of her dead son, slain in the fight for Irish freedom. Sad journey, we're on. But God is good, and the Republicans won't rather be down. What good is that to me now? Whether they're up or they're down, it won't bring me darlene boy from the grave. Still and all he died, a noble death, will give him a barium like a king. And I'll go on living like a pauper. Or what's the pains I suffered bring in him into the world to carry him to his creed, to the pains I'm suffering now. Carry in him out of the world to bring him to his grave. That'd be better if you didn't go at our Mrs. Tankret.

I've seen the first of him. And I'll see the last of him. He was my only child. And to think that he was lying a whole night, stretched out on the side of a lonely country lane with his head. His darlene head that I often fondled and kissed half hidden in the water of a running brook. They said he was the leader of an ambush in which, me next to our neighbor, Mrs. Manning, lost her free state soldier son. And now, here's the two of us, our women, standing one on each side of a scale to sorrow, balanced with the bodies of our two dead, darlene sons. No mother of god, mother of god, have pity on the pair of us. Oh, blessed virgin.

Where were you? When we darlene, son was riddled with bullets. Oh, sacred heart of the crucified Jesus, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Take away this mother in hate and give us thy own eternal love. Women, common and extraordinary, speaking Shauna Casey's truths about love and loss. Tenacious women who cling to life, though it be life without ease, knowing more of its value than the men who surround them. The last of our Casey's three great early plays, the plow and the stars, was a pill which did not get past the Dublin Adam's apple, so rough for its edges

and so thorny its passage. In the plow and the stars, there is a young wife, Nora Clitherow, who fears for the life of her rabble husband. Before the play is done with, she is mad and hopelessly lost. It is Easter week, 1916, the days of the rising. And Nora has paid an illicit visit to the front lines of Dublin Street fighting war, to make shift barricades thrown up across North King Street. The horror she sees sends her reeling back to her stun neighbors. She tells of confusion and blood, and of a horribly torn and mutilated boy dying in the cobblestones, trying to die and be done with it. She tells of horrors moving among the men at the barricade.

And hardest of all to take. She tells of fear, fear in the eyes of heroes, and the most damning fear of all, fear to admit fear. It was too soon, after that costly street war, it was too soon for the abbey audience to listen in on the tail, Nora Clitherow, brought back to her neighbors. OK, see, had a gang put fiery truth in the mouth of a woman, liberated, perhaps, touched too far by her oncoming insanity. And so the plow and the stars was protested and stopped by its second night audience. The year of the plow and the stars in the abbey theater was 1926.

The year that OKC removed himself forever to England was 1926. But he took enough, after he left Ireland, and he took enough of his country with him to write his last plays, the shorter pieces, and all those massive autobiographies. He could reach far enough into the past to summon up a memory of his first job that wasn't just a job. I was sent up to give you a hand. Well, you'll have to come a little near, I won't you. If you're to be a man in use, you heard what happened to the one that had your job before you. Oh, I saw him driven forth, and I guess the reason. He was caught interfering with the girls in the Thornton department. The girls led out on him in a naughty other day to the owner.

They just couldn't stand it any longer. Oh, horrible, horrible thing for him to do. No one with a decent mind would try to do that sort of thing on a poor girl. Well, he done it. Oh, it's not nice to think of it, much less talk about it. Well, be careful now. I got to stretch further in now, so keep a steady hold of the ladder. Oh, steady, steady, Alice, I was dear. You're not holding a tight. Well, let me up there. I'm used to ladder. No, now you don't know the stock. Look, it's no good, you're holding the ladder. Hold me. Then I'll feel safer. That's no good either. You're only making it so that it can't move at all. How am I to hold you so you can move about the way you want to? Well, if you can't think of a better way, then don't hold me at all. Oh, nice.

How comes you're wearing Alice? How far do they go up on your leg? Oh, well, that's hardly part of your business. I'm going to have a look. Well, don't do that. No, don't. I mean, you'll make me wiggling. I'll fall off. I'm powerless up here. Come on, now you hold the ladder steady and will never get finished. Look, just put your hand on me ankle seat. Write on me ankle. That's it. Now, if you're safer. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, you're mustn't. Don't, oh, but that's terrible. I mean, it doesn't fear on me. Don't. I got to go. Oh, no, no. It was a kiss before you go. Oh, you're a bad boy. That boy, taking me on a wears like that. I mean, you tumbled me about as if I wasn't a good girl. Such a sudden pounce. I couldn't get me breath to tell you to stop seething on me like a savage terrible. Oh, oh, but then I, I know you didn't

mean to be so rough, did you know, John? When he came to write of the girl on the step ladder in the commercial house, it was nearly 50 years later. And he still remembered that his first touch of her made a star of spring and the flush of summer and the fruitful burden of autumn and the rushing waters in the wintertime flow and juttle together in his being. God's love and care were there, he said. Press down and overflowing in the form of a pretty face and a slim quivering leg. Her legs were as plant and slim as fresh golden branches of willow. I see luster of love on each limb, looking down

from the heights of a pillow, looking down from the heights of a pillow. Even here, even now, when the sun had set, there were things to say, things to do. I drink first, what would he drink to? The past, the present, the future, to all of them. Here with white and hair, desires falling, strength having out of him, with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left him. He drank to life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah, I know our valley fair, I lead our own. I know our cottage there, I lead our own.

Far in that valley shade, I know what tender made. Flour of the hazel plate, I lead our own. Where she no longer a true, I lead our own. What would her lover do, I lead our own? Fly with a broken chain, far over the sounding man. Never to love again, I lead our own. You will in time decay, I lead our own.

Beauty must fade away. This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network. You will join us. . . . .

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