Unlike the directors of the Abbey Theatre, Sean O'Casey was slum-born and bred, self-educated, and deeply involved in the political and labor ferment that preceded Irish independence. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, on March 30, 1880. His famous group of realistic plays produced at the Abbey form, in effect, a commentary on each stage of the independence movement. The melodramatic The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), the first to be staged, deals with the guerrilla war conducted by the IRA until the peace treaty was signed in 1921. In the 1930s, O'Casey served as a drama critic for London's Time and Tide, producing a group of scathing comments on West End conventionality, which have been published as The Flying Wasp (1937). Sean O'Casey died in 1964.
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