Ireland’s Abbey Theatre returns to Canada
Play about 1916 Easter Rising is a classic that still speaks to us a hundred years later
When Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars debuted at Ireland’s national Abbey Theatre in 1926, audiences rioted.
It had only been a decade since Ireland’s Easter Rising rebellion that saw Irish Republicans fight to end British rule with almost 500 people killed, and the wounds were far from healed. The play was scathing in its criticism of the Irish Citizen Army, which took part in the Rising.
“It was really a terrible little revolution and it sparked this huge revolt in the Abbey. People were in an uproar. They tried to storm the stage and have the play taken off; it wasn’t showing the revolutionaries in a very good light,” star James Hayes says from London. “It is quite a cynical, bold play.”
On the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the Abbey Theatre is returning to Toronto for the first time in 26 years in a restaging of the landmark play. It runs at the Bluma Appel Theatre from Sept. 14 to 18.
The Plough and the Stars follows the residents of a Dublin tenement during the riots. The play would become an Irish classic and was eventually made into a Hollywood film by John Ford, starring Barbara Stanwyck.
“What was extraordinary for me is that a hundred years after the Rising, I’m standing on top of the Abbey Theatre rehearsing the play and you can see the flag of the General Post Office that was the headquarters of all the leaders who were eventually captured and shot. There is so much history there,” Hayes says.
At the age of 75, Hayes is the grand old man of British theatre, having performed from the British National Theatre’s very first season in1963. He has worked with the greats, including Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon.
His memoir, Shouting in the Evenings, is to be released later this month.
Born in Limerick, Hayes returns to his Irish roots with The Plough and the Stars in the part of Uncle Peter, a colourful member of the Irish National Foresters.
“Uncle Peter has a very big chip on his shoulder about everything and he lives in the past. He goes on and on about patriotism but is the first to run from the sight of a gun,” Hayes says.
“He is one of those characters who go about blowing trumpets about how marvellous this revolution is but are mostly stuck in pubs drinking about it.”
As Uncle Peter, an almost cartoonish depiction of Irish Republican bluster, Hayes has the most difficult job in not allowing his character to fall into caricature and empty symbolism.
“The women in the play are the more rounded characters. Uncle Peter is often the butt of jokes,” Hayes says. “It’s hard to round him off to make him a more rounded human being, but there is a journey. Although the point may be that some of the men in this play have no journey at all.”
This is also a strikingly contemporary adaptation of the play by director Sean Holmes and the centrepiece of his Waking the Nation season. The Toronto stop is the first in a North American leg that will see the play tour across the U.S.
“With so many in Canada with Irish heritage, I would say Ireland and Canada are inextricably linked,” says Abbey Theatre director Fiach Mac Conghail in a statement. “Like all great plays, The Plough and the Stars is urgently concerned with its own time and yet it remains fiercely contemporary.”
“It’s a pretty radical production,” Hayes says. “You might see someone in a 1916 soldier’s uniform, then you see someone in a McDonald’s outfit. It shifts back and forth.”
Holmes wants the audience to understand that the lessons of 1916 are still with us today.
There is a line in the play by one of the British officers, irate that the Irish are engaging in guerrilla warfare, a foreshadowing of things to come in later decades.
“He’s saying, ‘Why don’t they fight us properly face to face if that’s what they want?’ ” Hayes says.
“This is really about very poor people who just want to have a better life and the circumstances that can lead to violence, and we see that today.”
Whether audiences see echoes of Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq in the play remains to be seen.
“This isn’t about being a lovely period production. It’s a work that still speaks to us today,” Hayes says.