From the glorification of violent struggle in ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ through the rest of his Irish trilogy, Dublin playwright Sean O’Casey demonstrated the futility of violence to achieve political aims. Eventually in ‘The Silver Tassie’, set partially in the trenches of WW1, he espoused a pacifist message of the utter futility of war.

Maitrikaya explores how O’Casey believed in the solidarity of the entire human race over narrow national interests and how,...