The Plough and the Stars

Dublin, Abbey Theatre
June 4 - July 12

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O 'C a s e y : T hree Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and t he Paycock, T he Plough and the Stars

Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, David Krause

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    When The Plough and the Stars premiered at the Abbey Theatre Dublin in 1926, co-founder W.B. Yeats was ready for trouble. Nineteen years earlier Yeats had found himself at the centre of a national storm when Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World sparked riots for its portrayal of rural Ireland. The Plough and The Stars was the third in O’Casey’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’. The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock had both been popular successes and had helped the Abbey through a rocky financial period following the establishment of the Irish Free State. Neither play was completely benign in their portrayals of social and political Ireland, but The Plough and the Stars was to be even more vitriolic in its assessment of the mythos of romantic nationalism and its criticism of the newly-fledged state.
    The story follows the residents of a Dublin tenement in the months leading up to the 1916 Rising. They are a varied lot, from the colourful handyman Fluther Good, whose malapropisms were good for a laugh, to Nora and Jack Clitheroe, a young couple divided by the conflicting needs of living and dying for one’s country. Among other denizens of this socially, psychologically, and politically charged space are the ranting socialist Young Covey, whose pronouncements of political failure leave little room for ambiguity about O’Casey’s disillusion with nationalism. The initially seemingly insignificant Bessie Burgess is also an important character, the formidable drunken mother of an Irish boy fighting for King and Country in World War I. Bessie has little nominal fondness with her primarily nationalist neighbours but she eventually acts as mother to all of them before meeting her death by a sniper’s bullet and bringing the play to a close.
    The play also featured the character of Rosie Redmond, a prostitute, and this alone was enough to scandalise the sensibilities of Irish audiences in 1926. Her presence on stage as a silhouette of Republican martyr Padraig Pearse delivered excerpts from some of his more famous and inflammatory speeches evoked responses varying from hisses of objection to a rain of coal. Yeats was completely prepared when the stage was rushed on the fourth night of the production just as the pregnant Nora Clitheroe was trying to convince her husband to leave the fighting by pointing out the fear in the eyes of his comrades. Amid the angry braying of the righteously indignant, Yeats took to the stage "like an ancient Roman senator" (in the words of actress Ria Mooney, who played Rosie), and made a speech condemning their ignorance. He had already submitted the text of this speech to The Irish Times in anticipation of the need to deliver it. Hoping to bathe in the warm glow of controversy, Yeats courted public anger with his pronouncement that "You have disgraced yourselves again. Synge first and then O’Casey. The news of the happenings of the last few minutes here will flash from country to country. Dublin has again rocked the cradle of reputation."
    Though Yeats was well aware of O’Casey’s talent and probably saw true merit in The Plough and the Stars, his speech had little to do with its artistic qualities. The Plough and the Stars is another brilliant piece of linguistic portraiture casting the realities of urban society against a vivid political canvas which contextualises and problematises those realities. Again structured with a gatefold-like shift of tone between Acts Two and Three, the play is cheerfully quarrelsome and darkly humorous throughout its first half before becoming increasingly sombre and hard hitting in the second. Well versed in theatrical tradition and as conversant with linguistic convention as any playwright before him, O’Casey was able to see and portray Irish life at its largest and its most minute levels with equal precision. He was able to incorporate a great measure of complexity through his acute observation of the patterns of speech and behaviour, a complexity which extended to his representation of political idealism and ideological failure. The playwright was even able to cast some doubt on his own principles, with Rosie Redmond’s earthy world-weariness turning equally on Young Covey’s blind enthusiasm for socialism as it does on Fluther’s well-meaning hypocrisy. The Plough and the Stars was, indeed, a moment which rocked the cradle of reputation, and the play itself has stood the test of time.
    The 2002 Abbey production is a straightforward one, eschewing recent attempts to postmodernise the text by director Stephen Rea. Directed by Ben Barnes with an evocative set by Francis O’Connor strewn with the debris of shattered and ordinary lives, it features a full cast of good actors giving well marshalled, thoroughly professional performances that give full reign to O’Casey’s words and make for a clear, unproblematic reading. Though Cathy Belton (Tartuffe) takes the inevitably showstealing role of Rosie Redmond, the most startling turn on the stage comes from Marion O’Dwyer (En Suite) as Bessie Burgess. Her initial ferocity is utterly compelling, and she manages to carry off the serio-comic bar-room brawl with Derbhle Crotty (Sive) without descending into simpleminded paddywhackery. By the time her character meets her sudden and pointless death at the climax, the actress has delivered a multi-layered characterisation encapsulating the paradoxes and contradictions upon which O’Casey thrived and which this thematically complicated but theatrically uncluttered production allows to shine through.