He’s only been here 10 minutes and already he feels at home.
Playwright Sean O’Casey, 44, is so pleased to be invited by the co-founder and director of the AbbeyTheatre, Lady Augusta Gregory, 72, to spend time here at her home, Coole Park. As he anticipated, the food is lovely and the conversation is about books and theatre and Ireland.
Coole Park house
Lady Gregory met O’Casey at the Athenry train station, and they took a third-class carriage to nearby Gort, where the Coole “side car” picked them up. Upon arriving at the house, Augusta said to him,
One and twenty welcomes, Sean, to the House of Coole.”
As she has with so many who have spent summers at Coole before him—fellow Abbey founder William Butler Yeats, about to turn 59; playwright and politician Douglas Hyde, 64; the late writer John Millington Synge—Augusta sensed that Sean needs extra care for his digestion and his eyesight.
Two of his plays have premiered at the Abbey, The Shadow of a Gunman last year, and Juno and the Paycock just this March. Both have been such big hits for the theatre that they have already been repeated.
Lady Gregory is hoping that, with a bit of rest out here away from Dublin, O’Casey can maybe come up with a third tragi-comedy about Dublin tenement life, to round out a trilogy of plays about the horrible effects of the Irish War for Independence and the Civil War.
O’Casey is hoping that he can have a much-needed rest, walk down by the lake to see the “mysterious and beautiful” swans Yeats wrote about, and join his predecessors in carving his initials into her copper beech “Autograph Tree.”
Lady Gregory’s Autograph Tree, Coole Park
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through V, covering 1920 through 1924 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, a short drive from Coole Park, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 