Red Countess Green Crow Countess Markievicz and Sean O'Casey

Event information

Thursday March 18th 2010 : Annual Play: Praxis Theatre Lab Presents - Red Countess Green Crow Countess Markievicz and Sean O'Casey BY Sam Dowling. Venue: St Augustine's Primary School, Henderson St, Coatbridge, ML5 1BL (Next to the Time Capsule) 7.30pm.
RED COUNTESS GREEN CROW takes us close up to Ireland's literary and political resurgence in the first quarter of the 20th century. It explores the friendship and rivalry between playwright Sean O'Casey and the revolutionary Countess Constance Markievicz played out amidst momentous national and international events: the rebirth of the Irish language, theatre and literature, the Dublin lock-out of 1913, the Great War of 1914-18, the growth of Sinn Féin and demise of the Parliamentary Party, the Easter Rising in 1916 and the too hasty execution of its leaders, and the final national acceptance of parliamentary democracy in a 26-county Irish Free State, leaving the troubled Northern Ireland for another generation to sort out.

The play details Sean O'Casey clawing his way out of poverty in the slum tenements to fame and relative fortune on the strength of his great trilogy of plays. Countess Markievicz, heading in an opposite direction, turns her back on the vast family estates in County Sligo to embrace the cause of Dublin's poor.

The people of Ireland are now in a time of economic downturn and low confidence in the government, and in Northern Ireland, paramilitary groups have not been silenced by the Good Friday Agreement. The play pits Countess Markievicz's uncompromising belief in the use of physical force for a united Irish republic against Sean O'Casey's conviction that poverty needs to be tackled before anything else, in a debate that still resonates today.