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Sean O’Casey’s landmark 1926 drama ‘The Plough and the Stars’ is very clearly rooted in a time and place: Dublin, 1916, during the Easter Rising. But a century on from those events, in a world that’s very different but unavoidably familiar, it remains a warm and tragic portrait of ordinary, unheroic people attempting to forge on with their lives during wartime.
Co-directors Howard Davies and Jeremy Herrin don’t try anything fancy with their classy revival and they don’t need to: it goes without saying that this play about Dublin has a depressing number of parallels with Gaza or Aleppo now.
I say it’s set ‘during’ the Rising: O’Casey’s masterstroke is to make his play not about the battle, but about ordinary Dubliners going about their lives, with the insurgency background noise that most of them are trying to tune out.
Indeed, in the audacious second act, the majority of the characters argue and brawl inside a pub while the Rising can be observed kicking off outside the window in muffled fashion.
It is not a play open to audacious directorial interpretation, nor does the sprawling cast feature leads in the conventional sense. In a way it’s difficult to single out any component for praise beyond Casey’s phenomenal text: the sense of inexorably encroaching darkness; the tender mesh of stories, some of which fizzle out jauntily, some of which blossom into elegant tragedies; the considerable black humour, right to the end; the refusal to depict the English as simple monsters.
Still, just to prove I watched it: Vicki Mortimer’s naturalist, multi level sets are fantastic, adding a cinematic depth. Picking out any given cast member is tough, but it feels like the women are at the heart of O’Casey’s writing, and Justine Mitchell as formidably practical Protestant matriarch Bessie and Judith Roddy as traumatised expectant mother Nora are superb. And much credit to both Herrin and Davies - the former stepped into the directorial breach after the latter fell ill, but their troubles haven’t intruded upon those articulated in the play.