Sean O'Casey (1880-1964), playwright and memoirist, was born at 85 Upper Dorset Street in the north inner city. He began work at 14, and became committed to the labour movement and Irish nationalism. The tragicomedies in his Dublin Trilogy dramatise life in poor inner-city tenements during Ireland’s revolutionary period. O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1923, followed by Juno and the Paycock the following year. Two years later, for the second time in the Abbey’s history, riots disrupted a performance of O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars. Nationalists protested what they perceived to be the cowardly portrayal of revolutionaries who fought in the Easter 1916 Rising. O’Casey died in Devon, England, in 1964.
