Christopher Murray: Sean O'Casey [2006] paperback

Christopher Murray's definitive study of Sean O'Casey, the last great writer of the Irish literary revival, provides a strong interpretative context for his life. He looks afresh at the Dublin of the 1880s and 1890s in order to provide an authoritative background to O'Casey's childhood, paying particular attention to the political situation from 1880 to 1922, setting it against O'Casey's own treatment in his autobiographies. How divergent from reality was 'O'Casey's Ireland'?

But O'Casey was an international as well as a national figure, half of whose life was spent away from Ireland and whose annual income came mainly from the USA. Up to the controversial premiere of 'The Plough and the Stars' in 1926 his writing career may be interpreted in the light of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory and their dream of a national theatre. Thereafter it falls into a much wider, equally contentious project with O'Casey's 'The Silver Tassie' and the Marxist 'The Star Turns Red'. Within that wider framework how did O'Casey fare?

Professor Murray establishes O'Casey as a self-made man of letters, an irrepressible fighter, a man who combined political courage and innocence, an individual torn between a humanist vision of life rooted in his Dublin childhood and a utopian but blinkered loyalty to the Soviet Union. Murray acknowledges that while much of O'Casey's work was uneven, flawed and overambitious, at its best it was infused with a passion and generosity that place it among the best bodies of drama in the twentieth century. Simultaneously, O'Casey rewrote his own life in his autobiographies, desperately attempting to re-establish an identity undermined by Yeats's rejection.

Rich in original material, Murray's biography reconstructs a life committed to writing itself as a moral endeavour. There was something profoundly religious in O'Casey's psyche, which was at war with the communism he embraced, just as there was something profoundly romantic in a sensibility that retained the image of his first love all through his years in exile. He was a man of many contradictions, a complex, combative public figure and yet a warm and intimate family man.

If O'Casey's life was in the end a failure, it was a noble one which reveals that, to quote a Jacobean playwright he admired, 'Integrity of life is fame's best friend'. That integrity shines through in this biography more brightly and engagingly than ever before.