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Theatre of Ottawa |
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Theatre of Ottawa |
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Performance dates: Oct. 25 -28, and Nov 2 - 4, 2000
| Sean O'Casey was the gifted playwright of the Irish literary renaissance, who grew up desperately poor in the tenements of north Dublin. He was persistently troubled with a succession of illnesses, including cysts that permanently weakened his eyes. He had little formal education, teaching himself from the books his father, a Protestant pastor, left behind upon his death when O'Casey was a child, or those he later purchased with the savings he could eke of out of a series of unsteady laboring jobs.
But from this background emerged a literary genius who produced a collection of theatrical masterpieces – one of which is The Plough and The Stars. The Plough and the Stars of the title is the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, one of two militias that participated in the Easter Rising of 1916. O'Casey was himself a member of the Irish Citizen Army. But blackballed from employment for union activity during the employers lockout of 1913, O'Casey was so weakened in health by this period of acute poverty that he could not join the active rebels. The Rising is the seminal event of Irish independence. The Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers joined forces to seize key command and communications centres of the state apparatus. Chief among these was the General Post Office from the steps of which Padraig Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. As a military operation, the Rising was a cataclysmic failure. Britain, its eyes fixed on the struggle with Germany during the Great War and in no mood to countenance the opening of another front to its West or to discuss a political settlement at that time, reacted with a mailed fist. The rebels were quickly put down by the superior force of British arms, and 16 of the Rising's leaders were captured, tried and executed within months. The martyrdom of the 16, together with the imprisonment of other political leaders, galvanized the population and provided the political momentum that led to the Treaty establishing the Irish Free State in 1922. The Plough and The Stars does not romanticize the Rising. O'Casey does not erect a sterile monument to the heroes. A man of great passion, he was also one of acute observation. In this play, we have a wonderfully-sketched portrait of Dublin men and women caught between the urgent call to the barricades and the comfortable temptations of the status quo. You will see: Fluther (Richard Carey), the practical handyman and occasional voice of common sense; Bessie Burgess (Clare White), "the right old Orange bitch" moved, we shall see, by caring and courage; the Covey (Peter Politis), the know-it-all socialist, who heaps scorn on the rebellion for its failure to promote the working man; Jinny Gogan (Sarah Hearn), an energetic busybody more prone to dwelling on gloomy thoughts than the care of her children; Uncle Peter (David Parry), an irritable bachelor drawn to pageantry and the symbols of Irish nationhood; Nora Clitheroe (Kel Morin-Parsons), the newly wed and determined wife who seeks to raise her family above the standards of the tenement; Jack Clitheroe (Mark Leahy), her husband, a bricklayer and a commandant in the Irish Citizen Army, who rebuffs Nora as the call to arms beckons; Rosie Redmond (Lynne Cooper), a lively and attractive habituée of the public house, who resents the term "prostitute"; Mollser (Marielle McGovern), the sickly but perceptive child; Captain Brennan (Sacha Bédard) and Lieutenant Langon (Brenhan McKibben), officers of the Irish Citizen Army; Corporal Stoddart (Brian Lloyd) and Sergeant Tinley (Doug MacDonald), soldiers of the victorious British forces. No better tribute could be paid to the strength of O'Casey's portrait of 1916 Dublin and his rejection of heroic platitudes than the condemnation in 1934 of the play by Eamon de Valera, President of Ireland, who had also been one of the key military leaders of the Rising. O'Casey's plays, de Valera said, "touch upon the struggle for national independence in a manner that tends to create a false and unfavorable opinion of the motives and character of men who, during that struggle, risked their lives in the service of their country." In arguing that the Abbey Theatre must not be subsidized to perform O'Casey's plays during a tour in the United States, he accused the playwright of "caricature and exaggeration" that would serve to "arouse feelings of shame and resentment among Irish exiles." W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet and founder of the Abbey Theatre, fought back against de Valera and successfully secured the subsidy. Yeats' own perceptions of the Easter Rising were more attuned to O'Casey's as portrayed in The Plough and The Stars than those of de Valera, who had obvious reasons to want to control public perceptions of the events that ultimately brought him to power. The Plough and The Stars contains no note of historical inevitability; no view that these events had to happen for Ireland to arrive at independence. In fact, the focus is one of great tragedy, of characters who are caught inside great events and act according to their personal strengths and weaknesses, without any sense of the eventual outcome. The question remains, as Yeats asked in his great poem "Easter 1916":
Was it needless death after all? Of course, Yeats then answers his own question – not to say martyrdom was necessary, but that the supreme sacrifice paid by so many imparted a deep gravity to those events, a sacred and tragic moment at the birth of the modern nation. The leaders of the Rising
Now and in time to be, The Plough and The Stars portrays this moment from the inside out, through the eyes of the inhabitants of a single tenement house in north Dublin, within a few blocks of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. |
