SOURCE: “Juno and the Playwrights: The Influence of Sean O'Casey on Twentieth-Century Drama,” in Irish Writers and the Theatre,edited by Masaru Sekine, Colin Smythe, 1986, pp. 71-86.

In the following essay, Kosok demonstrates that O'Casey's influence on contemporary dramatists was negligible beyond his work in the “Dublin trilogy.”

I come from the same area as Sean O'Casey about whom I don't intend to say anything for the simple reason that it would be like praising the Lakes of Killarney—a piece of impertinence. As far as I'm concerned, all I can say is that O'Casey's like champagne, one's wedding night, or the Aurora Borealis or whatever you call them—all them lights.¹

This is how an Irish fellow dramatist, Brendan Behan, reacted to the plays of Sean O'Casey, whom he considered ‘the greatest playwright living in my opinion’,² and whom he defended vigorously against O'Casey's Irish critics:

In...