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Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ literally sparked a riot when it opened at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1926. His caustic take on the 1916 Easter Rising against English rule – seen through the eyes of the feuding, boozing inhabitants of a rundown Dublin tenement building – outraged many Irish Republicans.
O’Casey challenged what he saw as mythmaking about the birth of the Irish Republic. Fittingly, then, Lyric Hammersmith artistic director Sean Holmes’s staging – which first played at the Abbey Theatre in 2016 – takes a pick-axe to the reverential layers that bogged down the play’s last London revival at the National Theatre.
Holmes’s production is in modern dress and stripped back, lacking any sense of period drama, giving the play an HD quality. Designer Jon Bausor’s set is all plywood doors and precarious scaffolding – the barest outline of a building. The lack of privacy is stark for a community who delight in knowing each other’s business anyway.
Holmes takes the rolling pitch and flow of O’Casey’s knotty, wordy dialogue – its drift – and sensibly heightens everything else around it. Characters grab mics from the front of the stage to sing folk songs that get louder with every pint. There’s an off-kilter feeling to Paul Keogan’s feverish lighting changes. This is a deprived landscape caught up in dreams of escape.
This turns the squabbling between Peter Flynn (a quaveringly puffed-up Niall Buggy) and the Marxist Young Covey (a fittingly annoying Ciaran O’Brien) about swords and ceremony into more than what could just be intermittently funny flicks into broad comedy. Holmes highlights how this play-acting is deeply rooted in frustrated machismo.
The cast do strong work – notably Hilda Fay as Bessie Burgess, drowning grief in alcohol and shouting at the world. Kate Stanley Brennan is moving as Nora Clitheroe, who wants more from her life than the bristling nationalism that, in reality, widows her long before her husband goes to fight the British. The women might pick up the pieces but they dominate the stage here.
But while its portrayal of the combustible mix of need, anger and grievance that creates conflict is sharp, Holmes’s meta-theatrical approach feels rote some time before the conclusion of the play’s overlong final act. The gains made by the production’s constant sense of knowing self-awareness go hand-in-hand with a certain shallowness. You’re left wanting more.