Sean O'Casey, one of the greatest of Irish dramatists, was born in Dublin on 31 March 1880 and died at Torquay, Devonshire, on 20 September 1964. The first half of his life was spent in the appalling slums of his native city. He was almost entirely self-educated and read widely in his teens, including in his reading the works of Darwin, Shaw and Marx. In his early twenties O'Casey strongly supported the movements working for the cultural, political and economic enfranchisement of Ireland, but he later became disillusioned with Irish politicians and he took no part in the Easter Rising of 1916.

His interest in drama as a medium was born out of this disillusion. Yeats, who with Lady Gregory had founded the Abbey Theatre, persuaded O'Casey to write about the slums he knew so well and the result was The Shadow of a Gumman performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This, and his second play Juno and the Paycock, were extremely popular, but the first performance of The Plough and The Stars, the very fine play which followed Juno, provoked riots among those who felt O'Casey's criticism of fanaticism to be a denigration of the patriots of 1916.

O'Casey parted company with the Abbey Theatre in 1929 after various disagreements and Yeats's rejection of The Silver Tassie. He had settled in England in 1926 and did not live in Dublin again though, like Joyce, he never lost his interest in Ireland and Irish problems. In the plays of his old age, beginning with Red Roses for Me(1945) he returned to Irish themes and idioms and these final plays, writes Professor Armstrong, 'show an awareness of the nature and limitations of his own genius which he did not possess when he wrote his middle plays. Living intensely in an age of cataclysmic destruction', he concludes, 'O'Casey sought a principle of hope and joy, and his quest succeeded most when it was directed by intuitions of Ireland's needs and Ireland's better self?'