Overview

Next Year Will Be a Good One is SHIVAUN O’CASEY’s memoir of childhood and her youthful endeavours as an aspiring actress and stage manager in Devon, Bristol, London and the United States. She and her father, the famous playwright Sean O’Casey, her mother, the former actress Eileen Carey, and her two gifted older brothers, were a close-knit family. Her earliest memories were those of the blackouts, warning sirens, bombings, and all-clears of the Second World War.  At the suggestion of George Bernard Shaw, she and her brothers attended the famously progressive Dartington Hall school in Totnes. In London and Paris she was befriended by playwrights and directors who had fled McCarthyism in the United States and was especially close to Sam and Charlotte Wanamaker. Samuel Beckett, Harold Macmillan (wearing his publisher’s hat) and David Garnett are among those who enliven an already spirited story.  Shivaun’s memoir of her early life is rooted in the figure of her father, struggling despite his failing eyesight to create plays different from the great Dublin trilogy that had brought him early fame. She was an eye-witness to his genius and creative resolve and to the wider developments of contemporary drama. Hers is a story of love and loss amidst the extraordinary busyness of a life dedicated to theatre. 

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    SHIVAUN O’CASEY has been an actor, director and producer. As an actor she worked in TV and film but her first love has been theatre. She has been directed on stage by Stephen Frears, John Blatchley, Peter Gill, Jack MacGowran and Robert Kidd. In New York City she directed Frank McGuinness’s Baglady and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, Sean O’Casey’s Purple Dust. From 1990 to 1999 she led the cross-community, cross-border O’Casey Theatre Company that toured Ireland, England and the U.S. In 2004 she directed and produced a documentary about her father with Mary Beth Yarrow called Under a Colored Cap; this was broadcast on RTE and BBC. Now retired in Devon, she looks after the O’Casey Estate and paints. John Wilson Foster was born and grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, and earned his doctorate in English literature at the University of Oregon while teaching as a part-time instructor. His teaching and research career was spent at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, of which he is a professor emeritus. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Among his publications are The Achievement of Seamus Heaney (Lilliput Press, 1995); Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (senior editor, Lilliput Press, 1997); The Titanic Reader (Penguin Putnam, 2000); Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons (Notting Hill Editions, 2014; New York Review Books, 2017).

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