Certain ideas and themes preoccupied Sean O'Casey's mind throughout his life. As we might expect, they recur again and again in his work, in autobiographical narratives and occasional prose writings as well as in the drama. Most important of these recurrent interests, perhaps, is O'Casey's desire to find order and harmony in a world rent by physical and spiritual chaos…. In his drama emphasis is often placed on disorder and selfishness, shown particularly in social and economic exploitation, and in man's inhumanity to man. This subject is shown, notably, in the degrading effects of war and poverty. At the same time, O'Casey subtly realizes the moral ambiguities inherent in the problems of law and order in a country dominated by a superimposed alien system of morality and justice and therefore particularly vulnerable to revolution and anarchy. These problems are naturally most apparent—and often in the forefront of the action—in the early plays set in Ireland during the period from 1915 to 1922, The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock (to place them in chronological order of subject-matter rather than order of writing). Yet from the evidence of later works like Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me, where the discussion is continued though in a less prominent manner, it is clear that O'Casey did not consider the matter resolved by the ending of "colonial"/rule in Ireland.
It is surprising how writers on O'Casey have ignored the significant number of references to "law and order" which may be found in his writings, particularly the term's multiple occurance in the six-volume autobiographical narrative…. [Whenever] there is an appeal to such a notion, or the phrase itself is introduced in disputation in O'Casey's plays or Autobiographies it is invariably in an ironic context. Those who invoke the idea are often the least law-abiding themselves. (pp. 265-66)
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