Cock-a-Doodle Casey

...O'Casey explained, as theories crumbled about me, that "comedy purges the emotions just as much as tragedy does...

...Seamus Kelly), who later turned up playing Flask in John Huston's Moby Dick, had gone to England to see an amateur production of the play...

...Recorded facts were that he was a member of the editorial board of the Daily Worker, that he had repeatedly praised the Soviet Union, and that he had draped a red cloth ("It would be her red flag," he wrote) over his mother's coffin...

...An O'Casey defender in Ireland wrote to the Irish Times that the play ought to be performed in Dublin to "stem the atrophication of the Irish mind...

...But O'Casey said that when he wrote The Silver Tassie, for example, with its" "expressionistic" second act, he "didn't know the difference between expressionism and impressionism," he thought he was writing a kind of ritual...

...When I saw one of the latter, I recalled more vividly than ever the way the conversation with O'Casey kept returning to the "feeling for life," the things that make it better and the things that hold it down...

...Looka, lovely lady," he says, "there's no danger, an' there never was...

...Here was the boldest and most flexible blend of realism and fantasy he had yet attempted...

...And then, recalling the sudden smile, I think of the obstreperous Cock that materializes in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy...

...He was lonely, an' only goin' about in quest o' company...

...It is not surprising that O'Casey has given his blessing to a musical version of Juno called Daarlin' Man...

...He looked at me with unexpected severity...

...Even if the story of Christ was only a legend, it was a great legend, he said...

...Though, when he said things like, "I've been a Communist for forty years-since long before Russia came out with it," it was the same paradoxical O'Casey who has said of the Communists: ROD NORDELL, book editor and former theater critic of the Christian Science Monitor, spent a year in Ireland working on a study of O'Casey...

...At the time, he said, he was observing the man who came to the house to chop wood...

...if they don't, I'm still satisfied...

...In Juno the comedy of Captain Boyle and Joxer both enhances the tragedy of Juno and keeps it in perspective...

...I was eager to ask O'Casey about the technique involved in such unlikely combinations, which had brought him both praise and censure from the critics...

...But he did take delight in quoting an unintentional heresy he had detected in a critical letter from a Catholic...

...The comedy survives with the tragedy, not only for the sake of irony but to indicate the irrepressibility of life-it ends, but it continues...

...Don't be frightened of life-or frighten life away, says Cock-a-Doodle Casey, touching reality with fantasy on the way toward his truth...

...He had not caught the error because the proofs were the first he had seen and, when he didn't receive a title page, he did not know enough "in my ignorance" to ask for it...

...They drive me mad...

...The tenement eloquence is Irish, but the yearning must be universal...

...The relation between the two in his plays, as far as he could see, was no more subtle or significant than it is in life...

...From that early effort, varying its style in fairly well defined segments, O'Casey developed beyond the simple symbolism indicated in the title of The Star Turns Red to the intimate intermixing of realism and fantasy in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy...

...At the time of our conversation, he had already written Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and seen some of his countrymen's response to it...

...Well, let's have a laugh or two beside the coffin...

...Nothing should get in the way of removing economic injustice and providing for the bodily needs of all men...

...This is what O'Casey sees, I write, remembering the stern moment of our first encounter...

...He used the example of God's linking himself to man through Jesus in support of his conviction that the artist cannot separate himself from the people...

...The fact that such heroism is often taken as a matter of course, that in The Plough and the Stars the card game literally goes on, heightens the communicated sense of the ordinary human being's dignity and strength...

...added that "many of O'Casey's sins may be condoned, because his propagandist indignation is so obviously sprung from an enduring love...

...There have been performances, mainly amateur, in other parts of the country...

...Now he said that a materialist philosophy was "the only one...

...After all, the mixing of tragedy and comedy had been a challenge to critics (I thought) ever since Heracles' drunk scene in the Alcestis of Euripides...

...He said he still had several plays about Ireland in him...

...I had laboriously proved to myself that O'Casey's non-realism served an editorial function, permitting him to make generalized comments-anti-war in The Silver Tassie, pro-Communist in The Star Turns Red-beyond the realistic incidents of the plays...

...For every impersonal cause, principle or ideal to which groups give their allegiance there is a recognition that it is individuals who die-and live...

...Take away this murdherin' hate, an' give us Thine own eternal love...

...He wasn't advocating that other countries should follow the Soviet model, he said...

...They know nothing but what they read in their little pamphlets...

...I mentioned that an author still in Ireland had told a literary meeting that with the loss of the "Wagnerian theme" of the fight for independence, Irish writers had little to write about...

...a colorful banner instead of the Black Flag that flutters over it now...

...Dryden said, "Contraries, when placed near, set off each other," but also, "Would you not think that physician mad, who, having prescribed a purge, should immediately order you to take restringents upon it...

...O'Casey's tragic figures do not so much tower above the crowd as dramatize the stuff the crowd is made of...

...It was any religion as a restrictive force, rather than as a faith, that bothered him...

...The late George Jean Nathan, a long-time O'Casey man, called this review "an explosion of patriotism at the expense of dramatic art...

...supper with his companionable wife, a former actress, and his two younger children and on into the evening in his spacious upstairs workroom with its large table piled high with books and papers...

...O'Casey himself wrote that he had more than 30 pages of close-packed typescript as documentation of the incidents in the play...

...In a letter to the English magazine Act he wrote: "We need color in the drama the colors that today are the prerogative of only the musical show and the ballet...

...O'Casey confirmed what many playgoers had suspected, that some of his material came from visits to pubs where he caught human attitudes and phrases to be shaped for the stage...

...O'Casey said that he jotted down what came to him now in one copybook, now in another, typed a rough draft, followed that with a final typed copy for the printer, and made additional changes in the galley proofs...

...O'Casey smiled at my seriousness...

...If they could develop their own means for guaranteeing a certain level of material security below which no one would be allowed to fall, good luck to them...

...O'Casey promptly banned all his plays in Ireland for the duration of the festival...

...He has now written at least two of them, The Bishop's Bonfire, published in the United States, and The Drums of Father Ned, which was expected to be produced in Dublin's theater festival last spring until authorities requested revisions...

...Not to make too much of a moment's impression, this first encounter with O'Casey still symbolizes for me the double-sided essence of his work...

...The combination of tragedy and comedy intensifies the tragedy by reminding us of the matrix from which it rises and enriches the comedy by suggesting it cannot be put down...

...He said he didn't worry about technique...

...The antics of a symbolic Cock become as real (in theatrical terms) as the terror of some of the characters who behold him on stage...

...O'Casey claimed not to be concerned with the theology of the Catholic Church...

...But the locale is less important than the positive thrust of the play in its celebration of "the rightful joy of life," as Nathan wrote, "and the proper dismissal from all consideration of those who would fetter it...

...I did not capture in my notes such a colorful definition of his approach as I later found in The Flying Wasp: "A feeling for life rather than a sense of the theater is the first thing a man must have if he wishes to become a dramatist This feeling for life isn't the real-life-characters or matter-of-factness, which are neither matter of fact nor real life, that the critics chatter and chirrup about...

...He later wrote me that his first published work, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919), was not written under a pseudonym, as had been supposed, but that a printer's error changed his first initial from "S" to "P" on the title page...

...but the essences of life, its comedy, futility, grandeur, lust, envy, hatred, and malice, terror, irony, and sincerity, and fascinating carelessness-all or some of these gathered together in a comely form of dramatic literature that is called a play...

...Instead of shiein' cups an' saucers at him, if only you'd given him your lily-white hand, he'd have led you through a wistful an' wondherful dance...

...The Irish Times critic, "K...

...This love of Ireland was apparent as O'Casey talked, a love that had survived the rankling memory of Yeats's and the Abbey Theatre's early rejection of The Silver Tassie and that was not above offering free advice to the object of its affections...

...But now, as I read the news of what amounts to an O'Casey festival in New York this season-Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, The Shadow of a Gunman, and a musical version of Juno and the Paycock-it is not what O'Casey said that I most sharply remember from the hours, in Devon over tea and...

...Even "K...

...he was concerned only with its acts...

...But a character responsive to the Cock's flamboyant message finds it easy to lead him docilely on a green ribbon...

...The foolish and the narrow-minded are horrified...

...As I listened, the controversial things, the self-proclaimed Soviet sympathies, the anti-Catholic outbursts, even what looked like malice toward Ireland, fell into place...

...When theatergoers arrive at The Shadow of a Gunman in New York, they will not find a program note saying that the guns to be heard are only stage effects, as the audience at the first performance did in the troubled Dublin of 1923...

...In a similar vein, he explained his anti-clericalism...

...Sacred Heart o' Jesus," says Juno, "take away our hearts o' stone, and give us hearts o' flesh...

...In the early plays, of which Juno is a prime example, the inseparable strands of tragedy and comedy are the counterparts of O'Casey's hard appraisal and sudden smile...

...I did worry about his technique, however...

...When I asked, in the manner of the early Fifties, if he were a card-carrying member, he smiled and said, perhaps also in the manner of the early Fifties: "Ah, that's the sort of question one doesn't answer...

...Later, Milton shock a finger at the "intermixing of comic stuff and tragic sadness and gravity...

...But you frightened th' poor thing...

...Horns sprout on a girl's head...

...It was life that O'Casey reverted to when I asked about the use of fantasy and other non-realistic devices combined with realism in his later plays...

...This is what he was getting at, whether comedy, tragedy, realism or fantasy was the method...

...And it's probably the sort of question one wouldn't have asked if O'Casey's work had not been criticized for what a writer in the Irish Bell called his "staccato Stalinism...

...If O'Casey does not follow the classic tragedians in showing us heroes and heroines of high estate in relationship to an accepted moral order, he does show us the capacity of common people for tragic stature in relationship to such still active 20th-century forces as nationalism and economics...

...In the less popular postwar plays, of which at least Cock-a-Doodle Dandy deserves to be popular, the still visible tragic-comic thread is woven with a similarly antithetic, similarly inseparable twinning of realism and fantasy...

...I had gone at Juno line by line and calculated that the prevailingly comic beginning led skillfully to a gradual accelerating recurrence of the tragic element, building up the dramatic tension with almost mathematical precision...

...Indeed, when I brought greetings from a Dublin tenement dweller with whom he had "been out of work together" in the old days, he expressed the deepest interest and most vivid recollection...

...If it satisfies me, the audience will like it...

...He wrote that it was "full to the brim with those misanthropic misinterpretations of Ireland that have cancerously grown in our best playwright since he shook the hog from his boots, and took to writing crabbed caricatures of the land and the people that made him...

...What is carved in my memory is the first long silent moment after O'Casey came into the room, his neck ringed with a cloth just as it must have been in the Dublin Gaelic League days when he reacted with proletarian wrath to the suggestion that he wear a collar and tie...

...O'Casey had not forgotten his hard growing-up among the Dublin workers...

...This jaunty experiment, like most of O'Casey's plays, can be enjoyed in the study, but it has taken until 1953 for a New York production to get underway...

...O'Casey exploded at this notion...

...In his autobiography, he had jibed at the "nicely night-gowned" and the "sisters and brothers of the nicely night-gowned...

...It was a sad fact to hear at a time when I was working, with a graduate student's zeal, on a study of O'Casey for Trinity College in Dublin...

...Less pretentious but more adroit than Within the Gates, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy cannot be dismissed under O'Casey's dictum that "a good acting play that is not also good enough to be enjoyed in the study is not worth a dying tinker's damn...

...O'Casey had begun by unfettering himself...

...Religions, not just the Roman Catholic religion, "lead people into metaphysical puzzles that delude them from the sordidness of the world which needs to be dealt with...

...As recently as 1951, after his most famous plays had been written, Ireland's greatest living playwright told me that virtually nothing was coming in from performances of his works...

...Economic injustice, ignorant superstition and religious domination are among the targets O'Casey found in the Irish village setting of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy...

...O'Casey's attitude was not simply that of a man born a Protestant in Dublin...

...This is essentially what O'Casey was conveying to me in his gentle brogue, unstiffened by a quarter of a century of English air...

...Even Eliot, even he, and all the others, are hanging on the lanyard of the Black Flag...

...He fended off my suggestions that possibly the Soviets had not quite lived up to their stated ideals...

...And then the eyes behind the small glasses crinkled, and a smile of the most warming friendliness broke the thin-featured mask...

...It would only give aid and comfort to my Irish friends, confirming their half-regretful, half-gleeful opinion that O'Casey should never have left the sweet embrace of Cathleen ni Houlihan, though he had discovered (as he wrote) "what an old snarly gob she could be at times...

...O'Casey described himself as an "international member" of the Communist party...

...But there are places today where such a program note might not be inappropriate...