Watching Irish Repertory Theatre’s vivid new staging of The Plough and the Stars, it’s easy to grasp why the premiere of Sean O’Casey’s play touched off riots at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
The Plough and the Stars involves people caught amid Dublin’s bloody Easter Rising of 1916 when armed nationalists proclaimed an Irish republic, only to be brutally suppressed by British troops. During a week of street fighting in the middle of the city, nearly 500 souls were killed and another 3,000 injured—many of them civilians.
When O’Casey’s play premiered in Dublin in 1926, these scores of dead rebels and citizens generally were honored by the locals as heroes and martyrs.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Yet the fictional working class folk who are so realistically and richly created by O’Casey in The Plough and the Stars scarcely prove to be heroic people—one scene shows several among them running off to loot a pub and a dress shop—so there’s little wonder that his tragicomic study of such Dubliners raised a ruckus.
Seen nearly a century later in New York, the play no longer possesses such stinging immediacy, but given a masterful production here, it remains a fine, moving study of everyday individuals swept up in ugly circumstances.
Structured as four episodes before and during the Easter Rising, the story mostly regards the tenants of a crummy tenement. Among them are Jack (Adam Petherbridge) and Nora (Clare O’Malley), young newlyweds much in love and expecting a child; Mrs. Gogan (Úna Clancy) and her sweet, consumptive daughter Mollser (Meg Hennessy); and the ever-caustic Bessie Burgess (Maryann Plunkett), a Protestant loyalist who mocks her neighbors’ patriotic fervor.
Covey (James Russell), a slacker type of socialist, is derisive of the republican passions expressed by the flag-waving likes of Nora’s elderly uncle (Robert Langdon Lloyd), a hard-drinking blowhard of a handyman (Michael Mellamphy), and a disgruntled poultry butcher (John Keating).
Several characters will die before the play concludes.
The Plough and the Stars begins more rather than less as a comedy, which grows nearly farcical during a scene set in a pub during a patriotic rally. Even as a speaker fires up the crowd outside, Rosie (Sarah Street), a frowsy prostitute, complains that all this fervor is bad for her business, and several would-be rebels rush in to down pints and brawl. The story irrevocably darkens when the revolt erupts six months later.
Joining the concurrently running revivals of The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock in Irish Rep’s staging of O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy,” The Plough and the Stars throbs with robust life. Charlotte Moore, the theater’s artistic director, skillfully unites her 14 players into a finely-meshed ensemble. All of the performances are never less than vibrant, but the actuality of Maryann Plunkett’s portrayal of doughty, kindly Bessie Burgess takes one’s breath away. And Terry Donnelly, a stalwart member of the company, provides a poignant cameo as a terrified suburban matron lost amid the tumult.
Charlie Corcoran, who designed the sets for the other two productions (as well as decorated the auditorium to evoke yesteryear’s Dublin slums), neatly and artfully copes with this play’s demand for four different locations. The sound design by Ryan Rumery and M. Florian Staab, with its intermittent noise of street fighting, bolsters the drama, as does Michael Gottlieb’s increasingly shadowy lighting.
It’s not merely a pleasure so much as a downright privilege to see The Plough and the Stars and its companion dramas produced as astutely as they’re staged here. Let’s hope that local theatergoers are taking advantage of this rare opportunity to catch all three of O’Casey’s classics performed in such exceptional circumstances.
The Plough and the Stars opened April 30, 2019, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through June 22. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
