The Harvest Festival is Sean O'Casey’s earliest extant play. Written in about 1918 or 1919, it was the second play that O'Casey offered the Abbey Theatre. It was turned down, but he kept the manu script and it now forms part of the extensive O'Casey archive in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. It has never been performed, and this is its first pub lication in the U.K. and Ireland, following on its U.S. publication by only a few months.