Synopsis:

Three early plays by Sean O'Casey – arguably his three greatest – demonstrate vividly his ability to convey the reality of life and the depth of human emotion –specifically in Dublin before and during the Irish civil war of 1922–23, but, truly, throughout the known universe. In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement dwellers in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in The Plough and the Stars, Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings.

As Seamus Heaney has written, 'O'Casey's characters are both down to earth and larger than life . . . His democratic genius was at one with his tragic understanding, and his recoil from tyranny and his compassion for the oppressed were an essential – as opposed to a moral and thematic – part of his art.' 

'From the perspective of the 1990s O'Casey stands out as Ireland's greatest playwright of the century. He it was who most passionately, most powerfully and most memorably dramatized the traumatic birth of the nation. He it was who gave to the twentieth-century theatre a greater range of vivid and original characters, male and female, than any other Irish playwright.' – Christopher Murray, from Twentieth-Century Irish Drama

'What's astonishing about these dramas, apart from the sheer richness and generosity of their humanity, is their ability, in Shakespeare's great phrase, "to move wild laughter in the throat of death".' – Daily Telegraph