Exuberance and Enchantment in Sean O’Casey’s Later Plays

Abstract

O’Casey as a playwright worked arduously to bring novelty and new insight into the theatre. He rose to both fame and controversy with his anti-heroic themes in his Dublin trilogy- a series of plays limning the poignant effects of the revolution on the Dublin’s poor. All of his plays have a meld of comic, serious themes dipped with poetic imagination. In his expressionistic plays he seeks to expand his aesthetic vision by including songs, chants, ritualistic scenes, allegorized characters and stylized sets. In his later plays, he dramatizes the conflict between youth and senility, between sexual expression and repression, between zest for life and lust for money, between revelry and misery, between freedom and servitude. These plays are unique as there is a judicious blend of "farce, satire, fantasy and symbolism. He has made use of all the possible visual and aural theatrical effects to make his plays worth reading and performing.