Come Here To Me!

“It appears certain that Nationalism has gained a great deal and lost a little by its union with Labour in the Insurrection of Easter Week, and that Labour has lost much and achieved something by its avowal of the National aspirations of the Irish Nation”

-Sean O’ Casey.

Joe Hanley as Fluther Good, in rehearsal for The Plough and the Stars.

There is no night quite as exciting to see a play as on its first night before the general public. Lines have been practiced, outfits adjusted, props moved slightly this way or that way, feedback taken on board. The stage is set by now, and nothing is as telling as the reaction of a sold-out house to a performance.

Based on the reaction tonight, The Plough and the Stars should enjoy a fine run now it is back home where it belongs.

Undoubtedly one of the most controversial plays to emerge from The Abbey, it is no doubt the one that first comes to mind for many when discussing the iconic Theatre. The riots that emerged during its 1926 run at The Abbey are well documented. These disturbances were, among other things, reactions to the sight of a prostitute on stage, the appearance of the Irish flag in a public house and the use of the words of P.H Pearse. For some, the play was seen as dismissive of the ideals of the men of 1916, and the leading Irish progressive figure Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was among those who disrupted the first performance of the play. A great irony was the fact O’ Casey had previously wrote so highly of her husband Francis, the pacifist who was murdered in very suspicious circumstances during the Rising.

In Sheehy-Skeffington, and not in Connolly, fell the first martyr to Irish Socialism, for he linked Ireland not only with the little nations struggling for self-expression, but with the world’s Humanity struggling for a higher life.

When The Abbey later refused The Silver Tassie, in 1927, O’ Casey left it behind him. The Abbey has never been able to leave O’ Casey behind it however, and The Plough and the Stars has returned to its stage on numerous occasions. This latest performance, directed by Wayne Jordan, is one I’ve been eagerly awaiting for months.

The characters in the play are not easy to carry. I have seen this play performed in the past in a way that did not quite do justice to the weight of characters like The Covey and Fluther. They’re supposed to be passionate, and nothing if not loud. Joe Hanley could not have got Fluther better, and over a ‘post-play pint’ I heard this view shared by many. Fluther is a loveable character despite all his faults, and produces many wonderful lines in the work. Best to hear them read right. His physical manner on stage also matches the character, and he completely makes the character his own, whether pacing a room or returning from an ‘Easter week shopping raid’.

Citizen Army members drill in the Phoenix Park, late 1913.

“The time is rotten ripe for revolution”, one of the most striking lines in the play, is sadly delivered more like any old line of dialogue (Is there ‘any old line of dialogue’ in any of O’ Casey’s work, come to think of it?) and not the powerful and central line it is. When one sees the two flags together, the national flag of Ireland and the flag of the labour movement, it is clear where the movement is inevitably heading, entirely convinced the time would not come again. The Rising hangs over the second scene of the play like an imminent disaster, a feeling captured here. Lines from P.H Pearse’s The Coming Revolution, as well as other sources like his famous graveside oration to O’ Donovan Rossa, are delivered by The Figure in the Window (Almost eerie stuff from Peter Hanly), and as Pearse declares that ” bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood”, one can see the tragedy ahead, something O’ Casey regarded as the inevitable conclusion of the merging of labour and nationalism.

Great credit is due to the team behind the set design, lighting and costumes for this play. Firstly, to deal with the costumes, I’ve no doubt only a tiny minority of us historical anoraks notice the varying shades of green of separatist uniforms(!), but the Citizen Army uniforms in the play are beautiful and are perfect. The same applies to the ‘tommies’ who appear towards the end of the play, looking every bit the part. The feeling and atmosphere of a small, tenement house is captured perfectly by the set, and the sound of distant guns or singing soldiers on their way to the front add greatly to the sights before us.

One thing I observed, and came as quite a surprise, was the high number of tourists at the performance. There is no play quite as fitting to take in on a trip here I suppose, and one couldn’t help but hear tourists comment on the affordable nature of Irish theatre, at least in an international context. It is most worrying then to read the ad taken out by the National Campaign for the Arts in the programme for the play warning of the potential cuts to the Theatre. “Its cost to the state is modest, but its worth is great”, it notes. It is on a night like this The Abbey really proves its worth.

Whatever one makes of O’ Casey’s assessment of what has become known as ‘Easter Week’, the cultural significance of the play is rarely denied. It is one of the Dublin plays, one still capable of sparking debate on whether not alone the Rising itself was justified, but if its goal was ever anything higher than freedom ‘not worth winning in a raffle’. It deserves to be presented like this, in a manner clearly showing great attention to detail. One could discuss the excellent individual performances from a well-selected cast at great length, but that is not the task of this blog, or a man who has not ventured near a play since Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband ran at the Abbey almost two years previously!

I will conclude by encouraging you to attend a production that remains wonderfully true to the text and the spirit it was written in, and is a fine representation of O’ Casey’s most stirring work that asks timely questions to this day. Lines from The Radiators From Space classic Faithful Departed always come to mind as one observes Jack Clitheroe walk away from his heartbroken love for a cause ‘greater than any wife’.

I don’t care if your heroes have wings
Your terrible beauty’s been torn

Perhaps 1926 was a tad soon to suggest as much.

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The Plough and the Stars runs at The Abbey until Saturday 25 September.