cover image Cheerio, Titan: The Friendship Between George Bernard Shaw and Eileen and Sean O'Casey

Cheerio, Titan: The Friendship Between George Bernard Shaw and Eileen and Sean O'Casey

Eileen O'Casey. Scribner Book Company, $19.95 (143pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19145-4

In this portrait of a friendship, Shaw takes center stage by force of character, blowing buffets of wit at the milder-mannered O'Caseys and everyone else (Yeats; Irish literary and theater grand dame Lady Isabella Gregory) who strays into his path. The seminal Irish playwright O'Casey and Irish-born polymath dramatist G.B.S. apparently met by mail when O'Casey asked Shaw to write a preface for his Three Shouts on a Hill . The request was politely declined, but Shaw became a lifelong ally, whose loyalty was especially appreciated when Dublin's Abbey Theatre declined to produce O'Casey's controversial play, The Silver Tassle . Shaw and wife Charlotte intervened in the O'Caseys' lives in many ways, offering strong-minded suggestions on their children's schooling, on whether Eileen O'Casey should continue to work as an actress and on how O'Casey himself might curb his tongue. Though affably written, the memoir is a sketchy, chatty, sometimes excessively coy account by the playwright's wife. Photos not seen by PW . (Nov.)