The Plough and the Stars is now most famous for causing a riot. When first staged at Dublin’s Abbey theatre in 1926, a group of republican women protested over its anti-heroic stance towards the 1916 Easter Rising. Seán O’Casey, ever more socialist than nationalist, was sceptical about the rhetoric of blood sacrifice, satirised Patrick Pearse and showed tenement dwellers looting in the midst of rebellion.
In Howard Davies and Jeremy Herrin’s production, the sense of danger is lukewarm until the last act. Large-scale, handsome, declamatory, it often feels like a tribute to 20th-century drama. Vicki Mortimer’s massive, detailed design immediately suggests the arc of the play: the tenement block is encased in a framework of rubble. Within it characters struggle with O’Casey’s lush and ardent dialogue. They are reduced to a remorseless larkiness. There are cockaded buffoons, capering drunks, cockney tommies.
Nor does the production pass the akimbo challenge. Put a woman in a shawl on the stage, and if you’re not careful, within two ticks she’ll have her elbows out and her wrists on her hips, looking as if she’s been drafted in for a peasant chorus in an opera.
Nevertheless, it’s the female characters who redeem the evening. It is dismaying to hear audiences congratulating a playwright on writing “good parts for women”: has anyone ever heard this sentence with “men” in it? Yet they are right. O’Casey rested his sceptical case on the destroyed lives of non-combatants. Females. He created parts that were constantly surprising, contradictory and inflected.
Judith Roddy is desolating as the woman driven mad by her husband leaving to fight. Justine Mitchell is extraordinary as the most interesting character of all: the utterly unexpected loyalist. The loud-mouthed complainer who is quietly kind. The busybody who turns out to be useful. The martyr who does not go with a good grace. Mitchell delivers her without a jot of sentimentality. With Roddy, she makes the last act searing.
