SOURCE: Ayling, Ronald. “Sean O'Casey and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.” Dalhousie Review 52, no. 1 (spring 1972): 21-33.

In the following essay, Ayling examines the complicated relationship of playwright Sean O'Casey to the Abbey Theatre.

“All art is a collaboration” 

J. M. Synge¹

I

Irish writers and comics, possibly begrudging Sean O'Casey's exceptional popularity, have claimed that much of this success in his native city can be attributed to the acting of the Abbey company and the active collaboration of the theatre's directors in writing and revising his plays. I remember vividly on my first visit to Dublin in 1956 being assured by Professor David Greene—a distinguished Gaelic scholar and Professor of Irish at Trinity College, Dublin, at that time—that the “difference in quality” between O'Casey's Abbey dramas and his later ones was that Lady Gregory and other friends helped shape and revise the earlier writings. Subsequently, I discovered that...