Juno and the Paycock, Murder!, Mary, Elstree Calling, The Skin Game

After the success of Blackmail, Hitchcock was tasked with filming successful plays like Juno and the Paycock (1930) by Seán O’Casey and The Skin Game (1931) by John Galsworthy, and neither of these pictures gave him any real creative leeway. Both of these theater adaptations feature acting that would be far more acceptable on stage than for the camera, but Hitchcock finds all kinds of interesting things to do with his players in Murder! (1930), where he focused particularly on Norah Baring as the mysterious female lead and Esme Percy (a former matinee idol who had worked with Sarah Bernhardt) as a murderous cross-dresser named Handel Fane. A German version of Murder! called Mary allows us to see just how important casting can be and how it can make a movie drastically shift its tone. In Mary, the character of Handel Fane is played by the tall and hearty Ekkehard Arendt, who is the exact opposite of Esme Percy in looks and manner.

Domesticity in the trilogies of Sean O’Casey and Yu Ch'i-jin

This article examines Sean O’Casey and Yu Ch’i-jin’s portrayal of the domestic realm in the Dublin Trilogy of the 1920s and Nongchon Trilogy of the 1930s, respectively. Yu is indebted to O’Casey for his themes and style in playwrighting, for he saw O’Casey’s works as models for his own dramatic depictions of colonial Korea. A close study of Yu’s approach and the two trilogies reveal that his “deep-rooted admiration” for O’Casey does not indicate Yu’s aims to Westernize Korean theatre, but rather reveals his desire to impact the Korean audiences with realistic depictions of their everyday struggles. Using Lionnet and Shih’s idea of “minor transnationalism,” I argue that this lateral relationship is an instance of transcolonial solidarity in which Yu echoes O’Casey’s methodology to contribute to establishing a national theatre and drama tradition as did O’Casey to the Abbey Theatre.

A resistência ao discurso nacionalista hegemônico na dramaturgia de Sean O’Casey

A fim de provar a virilidade dos homens irlandeses, subestimados pelo império britânico, o nacionalismo anticolonial implicou suspensão provisória do código de masculinidade civil em favor do código de masculinidade cívica, na qual o romance heteroerótico deveria ser proscrito em benefício da nação. Sean O’Casey, divergente desse ideário propalado pelo teatro nacionalista, enfoca em suas obras o descaso pela mulher-carne em favor da mulher-símbolo. Mediante exame da peça The Plough and the Stars, este trabalho verifica como o dramaturgo desconstrói o mito sacrificial na medida em que denuncia a patologização do nacionalismo como histeria coletiva decorrente da interdição a Eros.

O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)

Born into Dublin tenement life in 1880, Sean O’Casey (originally John O’Casey) went on to become one of Ireland’s most important playwrights, best known for his realist Dublin Trilogy, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre and included The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The four-act Plough and the Stars provoked riots on its second night as protestors objected to the play’s critique of Irish nationalism. O’Casey’s close association with the Abbey ended in 1928 when W. B. Yeats rejected his play about World War I, The Silver Tassie, which combined Realism and Expressionism. O’Casey moved to England in 1926, where he married the actress Eileen Carey, and he continued to write politically focused plays for English and American stages. He also wrote political essays and six volumes of autobiography. O’Casey’s family were working-class Dubliners who struggled financially after his father was seriously injured, and O’Casey started work at the age of fourteen. This first-hand understanding of gruelling poverty informed his life-long Socialism and his involvement in the 1913 Dublin Lockout strike. In The Plough and the Stars, his critique of nationalism centered on the disparity between the rhetoric of freedom through blood sacrifice and the hardships of working-class life.