Photo: Lloyd Cooney in The Plough and the Stars; Ros Kavanagh.
that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.” This unidentified figure speaks the ideas of Patrick Pearse, who wrote the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that he and six other leaders of the Rising signed, and who read it out at the door of the General Post Office shortly after noon on Easter Monday. At the end of the act, we hear the same man speaking the actual words that Pearse famously spoke at the graveside of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915: “They think they have pacified Ireland; think they have foreseen everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” The world of national politics and high rhetoric is nearly offstage in The Plough and the Stars, however. O’Casey focuses instead on a Dublin tenement and its residents. These people have different relationships to the events going on around them—some are enthusiastic, some hostile—and are affected by them in very different ways. It is a world that O’Casey knew well, having been raised in just such a Dublin tenement. Whereas most of the early productions at the Abbey Theatre involved traditional Irish legend and folklore or the lives of country people, O’Casey trained his eye on the lives and language of contemporary urban dwellers. Indeed, we catch a glimpse of O’Casey himself, perhaps, in the play, in the figure of the Covey, an ardent socialist for whom the international plight of the working class is of far greater consequence than the aspirations of Ireland to nationhood. The 1926 production of The Plough and the Stars provoked protest in Dublin from people who objected strenuously to O’Casey’s cynical view of the Rising and his antiheroic representation of its participants. So it is highly appropriate that the Abbey Theatre has chosen this play for a new production in 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising. The commemoration of the Rising has been a time of reflection on all that has followed on from it—not only the War of Independence, partition, the Civil War, and the establishment of the Free State and later the Republic, but also the decades of economic hardship and mass emigration, the violence of thirty years of Troubles, membership in the European Union, the Celtic Tiger, and its collapse. The questions still resonate: what did the blood sacrifice achieve? Was the violence necessary? In the words of W.B. Yeats in his poem “Easter 1916,” “Was it needless death after all?” Dr. Catherine McKenna is the Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures and Department Chair of the Harvard Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. This article was originally published in the A.R.T. Guide, available for free in the A.R.T. lobbies and online.
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