SEAN O’CASEY’s play The Shadow of a Gunman premiered 100 years ago, on April 12 1923, at Dublin’s national Irish theatre, the Abbey Theatre. 

The theatre, which grew out of the Irish Renaissance movement for the renewal of Irish literature in 1904, encouraged new Irish writers and provided a platform for the exploration of progressive ideas on stage. 

The Shadow of a Gunman is the first of O’Casey’s three Dublin plays, which examine the maturity and fortunes of the people at three important moments in Irish history — the Easter Rising (1916), the war of independence (1918-21), and the civil war (1922-23) — all of which O’Casey experienced. 

O’Casey did not turn to playwriting until he was nearly 40 years old, around 1920. Prior to that, he had participated in national and class struggles for two decades as a champion of Irish-language culture, a militant trade unionist and a socialist activist.  

Then, from the early ’20s until his death in 1964, he devoted himself to writing drama. 

He was the first English-speaking playwright of proletarian origin to enter the stage of the world theatre.

His plays are about the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people, and thus implicitly of all working people, from poverty, ignorance and exploitation, for the creation of a new, humane society. 

Born in Dublin in 1880, O’Casey came under the influence of Jim Larkin, the legendary trade unionist and — together with James Connolly — the driving force in this class struggle, even before the great lockout of 1913.

From that moment forwards, O’Casey’s maturation as a class-conscious socialist and communist internationalist can be traced.

At the same time, he remained true to the best traditions of Irish republican nationalism.

In the years leading up to the 1916 rising, disagreements arose between O’Casey and Connolly, who had taken over leadership of the left wing of the movement from Larkin, over Connolly’s effort to ally militant workers with the patriotic bourgeois nationalists who had been their class enemies in the 1913 struggle.

For this reason, O’Casey did not take part in the Easter Rising and no longer found a place in that organised movement. 

Increasingly he became a commentator on contemporary developments from a revolutionary-proletarian perspective, while continuing to earn his living as a worker.

At the same time he educated himself autodidactically. Between 1920 and 1922, he decided to turn to drama as a way for revolutionary action. 

At this point he saw his growing fears for the fate of the Irish Revolution tragically confirmed.

Ireland had been one of the storm centres of the revolution in the decade from 1911 to 1921. But that revolution was betrayed and the people defeated for the time being. The situation needed to be analysed. 

1913 was the decisive experience in which the Irish workers became conscious of themselves as a class, something O’Casey had understood.

But by 1922, the Irish bourgeoisie had betrayed the people and, along with the British government, established the Irish Free State — a fatal development that led to a tragic and bloody civil war. 

In his Dublin plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Peacock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), O’Casey sets out to show the Irish working class in all its weaknesses, illusions and self-deceptions which he believed had contributed to this defeat.

It is a critique set against the backdrop of the victorious Russian Revolution, which also allows him to create a tension between the actual and the possible.

There emerges a deep conviction of the people’s ability to revolutionise reality. 

How does he articulate this vision artistically?

The Shadow of a Gunman is set in the midst of the war of independence, in May 1920, in Seumas Shields’ room in a Dublin tenement.

Thirty-year-old Donal Davoren, writer of romantic verse, shares a room in this Dublin slum with Seumas, a 35-year-old peddler and one-time patriot who has now retreated into religion, superstition and bed.

The slum-dwellers are convinced that Davoren is an armed IRA man on the run and assure him of their support.

Flattered, he does not contradict them, especially when the ardent young patriot Minnie Powell falls in love with him.

O’Casey portrays life in the Dublin slums as characterised by poverty and lack of prospects, war, terror and violent death.

Their inhabitants do not seem to offer much resistance. The actual gunman Maguire passes unrecognised through their midst, touching them only briefly, in contrast to the mechanisms of oppression that are massively present and especially the British army. 

The unrecognised and shadowy gunman symbolises the way the national liberation movement fails to reach the broad masses of the people.

The separation of the liberation movement from the mass of the people, its tendency to put all its faith into the ritual of the gun, is evident in Seumas’s statement about the all-powerful gun: “I wish to God it was all over. The country is gone mad. Instead of counting their beads now they’re countin’ bullets; their Hail Marys and Paternosters are burstin’ bombs- burstin’ bombs, an’ the rattle of machine-guns; petrol is their holy water; their Mass is a burnin’ buildin’; their De Profundis is ‘The Soldiers' Song’, an’ their creed is, I believe in the gun almighty, maker of heaven an’ earth — an’ it’s all for ‘the glory o' God an’ the honour o’ Ireland.”

O’Casey, in contrast to the romantic image of a united, heroic people, depicts disunity, escapism, disillusionment on the one hand, and illusions on the other, along with lack of leadership and the inability realistically to confront one’s own situation. 

The tragedy is not that potential leaders are ahead of the times, but that the people have no leaders who are in tune with the people and the times.

Their best leaders were executed in 1916 and there is no sign that the masses can produce adequate leaders in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, all the human qualities necessary for liberation are there and embodied in the people, in their contradictions, even if they manifest themselves at the moment only as potential.

In his creation of contradictory, realistic characters, O’Casey creates a growing awareness of a possible alternative inherent in things as they are.

He exposes productive potential and makes clear that destinies could be steered in a different, better direction. And potential is perhaps also to be found in the play’s language with its irrepressible power and inventiveness.