I Knock at the Door

by Seán O'Casey, Paul Shyre (Adapter)

This is the story of Sean Casey's childhood, written in two acts for 4 men and 2 women. It was originally staged on Broadway as a concert reading.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Sean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind that is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life.

He was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

An autobiography told in the third person which accounts for the early life of Johnny Casside, born and raised in a working class neighbourhood in Dublin during the latter years of Queen Victoria's rule.
Almost by accident according to this account, his family is part of the small Protestant minority in that part of Ireland. Even more unusual, at a time when being Protestant meant to be a part of privileged ascendancy, the Casside's were poor, living in a household headed by a widowed mother, let to fend for themselves after the long drawn-out death of the father after an industrial accident.

Johnny has a mountain of other problems. He is afflicted by an eye condition which causes him agony in any sort of light. His elder siblings regard him as the runt of the family, adding to its already numerous problems. But his mother stands by him, finding a course of treatment that eventually brings him some relief from suffering.

In standing up for her boy Mrs Casside has to battle with her church's minister, a bullying individual who disputes medical advice that Johnny needs relief from demanding work regarding his eyesight, dragging him off to the local school where he is bullied by one of the masters. A lonely figure on the school playground, he is taken under the partial protection of one of the bigger boys who opposes his tormentors. But his association with this young man produces its own problems when he is unfairly singled out when caught on the fringes of a playground gambling game.

The social and political life of the Dublin of O'Casey's day are themes in the story. As Protestants the Cassides were nominally loyalist and respectful subjects of the Queen. But the later father had been a strong supporter of Parnell and his advocacy of Home Rule for Ireland. There was pride in the fact that Parnell was himself a Protestant (as were other great Irish nationalists of the stature of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett and Napper Tandy). Johnny rolled easily enough with his Catholic peers but a sense of superiority crept in with the knowledge that it was the Romanish hierarchy which had did for Parnell after his relationship with Kitty O'Shea became public.

O'Casey strives to recreate the vernacular of Dublin streets, with a spelling that attempts to reproduce its distinctive accent. Vignettes break up the narrative of Johnny Casside’s life, dealing with his sister’s wedding, a visit to Mountjoy jail, and the unsavoury harassment of a Jewish street hawker who plies his trade as a repairer of broken windows. The boy observes a riot from the top of a tram between nationalists and loyalists and this part of his story concludes with his first encounter with a poem and a reflection of the fact that he had kissed a girl. Everything else lay ahead of him.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sad statement of O'Casey's life as a child in Ireland.