Recommendations
Books Like Juno and the Paycock
Best books to read after Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey
Readers who love Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey are drawn to its combination of tragicomedy, working-class Dublin life, the Irish Civil War's domestic consequences, and the portrait of Juno as the woman who holds the family together while the men pursue their fantasies — they want plays and novels that deal with Irish politics and its domestic consequences, the tragicomic tradition, and the working-class urban world.
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The Plough and the Stars
by Sean O'Casey
The companion O'Casey play — the Dublin tenement during the Easter Rising of 1916. Both are O'Casey masterworks organized around women who hold families together while men pursue fantasies of glory, and both investigate the gap between the rhetoric of revolution and the reality of what it does to ordinary people
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Playboy of the Western World
by J.M. Synge
Synge's companion in the tradition of the Irish play that caused riots at the Abbey Theatre — Christy Mahon's arrival with the story of having killed his father. The two Abbey Theatre plays that caused the most controversy: Synge's in 1907 for its depiction of Mayo rural life; O'Casey's (The Plough and the Stars) in 1926 for its depiction of the Easter Rising
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Translations
by Brian Friel
Friel's 1980 companion — the hedgerow schoolmaster Hugh Mór O'Donnell and the British cartographers remaking the Irish landscape. Both Translations and Juno and the Paycock investigate what colonialism does to a people: O'Casey shows the domestic consequences of political violence; Friel shows the cultural consequences of the colonial project
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Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's companion in the tradition of the Dublin literary investigation — fifteen stories of middle-class Dublin paralysis. Companion investigations of Dublin: Joyce's stories show middle-class paralysis; O'Casey's play shows working-class catastrophe. Both reveal Dublin as a city whose people are trapped between a constraining past and an unavailable future
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The Shadow of a Gunman
by Sean O'Casey
The earlier companion O'Casey play — the Dublin tenement during the War of Independence. The first of O'Casey's Dublin trilogy; shows the development of his major themes: the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and ordinary reality, and the women who suffer while men indulge their fantasies of glory
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The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's companion in the tradition of the play about a family whose central male figure is incapable of the practical action that would prevent disaster — the Ranevskaya family's inability to save the orchard. Both are companion plays about families where the man's incapacity (Captain Boyle; Gayev) forces the women to watch helplessly as the disaster comes
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At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O'Brien
O'Brien's companion in the Irish literary tradition of characters who pursue fantasies at the expense of the people around them — the student's novel-within-a-novel. Both are organized around characters (Captain Boyle; the student's fictional characters) who construct elaborate alternative realities to avoid the practical demands of ordinary life
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Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín
Tóibín's companion in the tradition of the Irish literary investigation of leaving and belonging — Eilis Lacey's emigration from Enniscorthy to Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Juno and the Paycock are companion investigations of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath from different temporal distances: O'Casey's play is the immediate response; Tóibín's novel is the long aftermath, the generation that left
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