The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey (review)

Before the curtain rose on the Abbey Theatre’s internationally touring production of The Plough and the Stars, a young woman climbed the stairs to the stage at the 925-seat “jewel box” Southern Theatre in Columbus, Ohio. She was dressed in a red Manchester United jersey and a skirt, and on reaching the stage headed to a preset microphone. I initially thought nothing of her presence, as I had seen several productions at both the Abbey Theatre and Southern Theatre and recalled viewing live curtain speeches at a few. Instead of delivering a standard curtain speech, however, this young woman began to sing “The Soldier’s Song” (the Irish National Anthem) in Gaelic. As this was a touring production from the Irish National Theatre and a part of a season commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising—a fact discussed in the program notes—even this seemed ordinary enough until, nearing the end of the song, the young woman took out a handkerchief and began coughing blood into it. Terrified, she then left the stage and the curtain rose, thrusting spectators into the gritty world of war-torn, poverty-laden Dublin that O’Casey dramatizes in The Plough and the Stars.

Although O’Casey’s wrote the third play in his “Dublin Trilogy” in 1926 and set it in the time leading up to the 1916 Rising, Sean Holmes’s revival mostly refused these specifics wherever possible. In so doing the production was able to draw lines of connection between O’Casey’s 1916 Ireland and 2016 contemporary Ireland. These connections were especially reflected in the production’s design choices. Catherine Fay’s clever costumes, for example, featured a mixture of period looks (the Irish military uniforms were authentically styled and crafted) and current ones (Mrs. Gogan and Bessie Burgess could have stepped off the streets of present-day Dublin), along with futuristic pieces (the fatigues of the British soldiers, for example, which served to highlight just how out-gunned the Irish soldiers truly were). Jon Bausor’s set design consisted largely of a green wall, a bare stage, and a three-story industrial scaffolding, which in the stunning fourth act was laid down by stagehands dressed as construction workers. Against this stark surrounding, O’Casey’s working-class characters grappled with a crucial question: What exactly is the price of revolution?

This question echoed throughout the performance, which also resonated with contemporary debates about the cultural and social costs of European Union bailout and subsequent austerity measures for Dublin’s working poor. Both the British backlash following the 1916 Easter Rising and EU-imposed austerity caused a sharp spike in homelessness, a reduction in social-welfare services, an increased need for tenement-style housing (much like those depicted in The Plough and the Stars), and increased levels of unemployment. These forces were, and currently are, felt most pointedly by women and children—a fact that the revival powerfully captured.

James Hayes (Peter Flynn), David Ganly (Fluther Good), and Janet Moran (Mrs. Gogan) in The Plough and the Stars. (Photo: Ros Kavanagh.)

Holmes underlined parallels between Ireland past and present throughout the revival. The similarities were reflected most directly in Rachel Gleeson’s brilliant rendering of Mollser (the young woman in the Manchester United jersey who opened the show). A 15-year-old teenager who is dying of consumption and living in a tenement house with the play’s protagonists, Jack and Nora Clitheroe (poignantly played by Ian-Lloyd Anderson and Kate Stanley Brennan), Gleeson’s Mollser was the very picture of gaunt starvation, poverty, and sickness. Her performance, which ranged from stillness, to confusion, to rage, immediately called to mind the hundreds of homeless teens forced to “sleep rough” on the streets of Dublin in the wake of the collapse of the Irish economy in 2008. Gleeson’s performance skillfully showed the complexity of both Mollser’s character and O’Casey’s dramaturgy. She was matched in performance by...