SOURCE: "Sean O'Casey," in Sean O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Kilroy, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, pp. 53-60.

An English critic and novelist, Williams was highly acclaimed for his neo-Marxist studies of literature, culture, and society. Some of his best-known works include The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), and Marxism and Literature (1977). In the following excerpt, originally published in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968), Williams contends that O'Casey's dramas primarily exploit the ironic contrast between the violence and desolation of life in Dublin and the carefree language of its working-class residents.

Irish history had broken into revolution, a war of liberation and civil war by the time O'Casey began to write for the Abbey Theatre. His first acted play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) is at once a response to this experience of violence and, in its way, a bitter postscript to Synge's Playboy...