Drama of harrowing intensity
The Plough and the Stars Lyttelton Theatre
The curtain at the Lyttelton Theatre goes up – not a rising, but a horizontal parting, like the opening of a great eyelid – on a scene of vast and foreboding verisimilitude: a Dublin tenement rendered with haunting exactness, down to the smears on the walls and the coals in the grate, except that where the roof should be, the walls rise ruined and desolate into the sky, presaging the destruction to come. Within, the tenement’s residents are clattering in and out of doors, getting on each others’ nerves, as people do who live in squalid propinquity.
The Plough and the Stars is the third play in Sean O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy, set in the city’s tenements during the Irish revolution of 1916-1923. It opens in November 1915, in a lodging-house whose tensions are a microcosm of the wider ferment. The central figure is Nora Clitheroe (Judith Roddy), a young matriarch-in-the-making, married to Jack (Fionn Walton), a newly promoted commandant in the Irish Citizen Army, whose constitution O’Casey himself had written.
Jack’s promotion comes as a surprise to him when a comrade arrives to announce it. Nora, fearing separation, jeopardy, or worse, has burned the letter telling him of it. He leaves in anger to attend a political rally at which snatches of a rabblerousing speech, for which O’Casey drew on the bloodthirsty oratory of the nationalist leader Patrick Pearse, float through the window of a pub where other denizens of the Clitheroes’ tenement are merrily consorting with Rosie, a local prostitute (Grainne Keenan). There is a scathing intimation that the whore indoors is no more careless of the passions she inflames than the demagogue outside the window.
The first two acts of O’Casey’s play unfold in a torrent of irritable verbiage. Political and personal skirmishes flare, subside, flare again. Private tragedies emerge: Mrs Gogan (Josie Walker), a belligerent charwoman, is nursing a daughter, Mollser (Roisin O’Neill), who is dying of consumption. Bessie Burgess (Justine Mitchell), a Unionist given to bellowing “Rule Britannia” from upstairs windows when in her cups, has a son fighting in the trenches.
Co-directors Jeremy Herrin and Howard Davies run boldly with what appear to be the longueurs of O’Casey’s text, allowing him to make at length the curiously apposite point that poverty, deprivation, the grinding misery of hopeless subjection, constitute a mixture whose long fermentation will eventually prove explosive. And from a slowish start the drama gathers in intensity to a final act of harrowing brilliance.
The explosion, when it happens, is at first tragi-comic, then purely tragic. As the Easter Rising begins, we see Mrs Gogan and Mrs Burgess grappling furiously over a child’s pram before wheeling it away on a joint looting mission. Meanwhile an elegant bourgeoise in fox furs appears, lamenting the fearful inconvenience of the shooting and demanding to be escorted safely home.
Home, as we find in the final scene, is no place of safety: walls and windows constitute no barrier to madness and death. The foreboding ruin of Vicki Mortimer’s magnificent revolving set is visited at full force on the ordinary lives that inhabit it. Among a fine cast, Judith Roddy as Nora and Justine Mitchell as Bessie Burgess rise to greatness in these last moments. As the play ends, there is a beat of silence before the ovation: the unmistakable sound of an audience whose imagination has travelled a great distance returning with an effort to present reality.