O'Casey, Seán
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (a short exchange of about three minutes; the automatic English transcript is somewhat garbled in places, including some names and titles, so uncertain passages are omitted or hedged)
Core ideas
The recording opens with a warm reunion: Fitzgerald says it is "a grand thing" to see O'Casey again after "a long, long absence", and recalls the stormy first night of one of O'Casey's plays at the Abbey Theatre (the transcript says "the Plough and the Stars", garbled), when the audience's uproar turned the usually quiet theatre into "a roar and a rush". He remembers W. B. Yeats coming onto the stage to face the crowd, shouting that the audience had disgraced themselves again, and the fact that Yeats used the word "apotheosis": Fitzgerald admits he did not understand it, wondered all the way home what it meant, and only later looked it up secretly in a dictionary, finding that it meant a man translated up among the gods. He suggests that Yeats had "some peculiar belief in the magic of a word".
Fitzgerald then recalls the first production of Juno (at the Abbey's Peacock theatre, per the transcript) as the moment he first met O'Casey, and O'Casey returns the compliment: he praises Fitzgerald's "peculiar poetic" touch, names fellow actors of that production (the transcript gives garbled names, with "Molly O'Neil" recognisable), says he often cursed the theatre that drove such an artist to "seek a living in another medium", and calls Fitzgerald "the greatest comedian that ever tried the English stage". Fitzgerald is moved and asks O'Casey for a song he used to sing in the first act.
In the second half O'Casey turns to the craft of playwriting. For him, "a theatre is not a physical body, it's an idea in a man's mind"; he claims that no one can really tell another how to write plays, and that every new play costs him the same "Herculean" effort as his first. He cites a remark attributed to Yeats (the wording is unclear in the transcript) and refers to a book he wrote about twenty-four years earlier (the transcript gives its title as "The Flying Wasp") in which he set out his view that drama should be a combination of all the arts: dialogue, music, ballet, architecture (the construction of the scene) and scenic design. He professes not to understand labels such as realism, expressionism or impressionism: "they're all mysteries to me".
Excerpts
“It ought to be a combination of all the arts. There ought to be music in it and ballet and of course dialogue in it, good dialogue in it, architecture in the form of the way in which the scene is constructed, scenic design, that's painting.”
“A theatre is not a physical body, it's an idea in a man's mind.”
“I never did know, I never will know what exactly realism means or any of the other forms to which names are given, such as expressionism, impressionism and realism. All that sort of thing, they're all mysteries to me.”