Paul T Davies reviews Sean O’Casey’s classic play The Plough And The Stars which is now playing at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.
The Plough and the Stars.
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.
21 March 2018
3 Stars
Book Tickets
A girl walks into the spotlight and sings, into a microphone, the national anthem. She begins coughing, and towards the end of the song begins coughing up blood. She is Mollser, dying of consumption in the play. The safety curtain rises and we are in a Dublin tenement in 1915. Except we are not. Here the cast are dressed in contemporary clothing, staring out at the audience, the tenement represented by scaffolding. The cast stare and confront us, setting the tone of Sean Holmes’ confrontational and controversial production. Sean O’Casey’s classic has been reconfigured into flat pack furniture, MDF and track suits, and is a mash of ideas. When it is too gimmicky, it looks like one of those awful “Eastenders visits Ireland” episodes, when it works and the ideas gel, which it does in the second half, it offers up a disturbing reminder of Ireland’s history.
It certainly takes some getting used to, and the sheen is taken off much of O’Casey’s poetic and powerful words, the cast often break the fourth wall and speak lines directly to the audience- irritating and unnecessary. Songs are sung, in the main, karaoke style through that microphone, again throwing away much poignancy. Where the production does land, however, it scores some sizable hits. Biggest of all is the cast, a company of wonderful actors that bring out depths of characterisation, and savour every word O’ Casey has given them. The superlative Niall Buggy is as wonderful as always as Peter Flynn, especially in his dexterous verbal bouts with The Young Covey, an excellent portrayal of an idealistic Communist by Ciaran O’Brien, providing effective comedy. O’Casey wrote fine, feisty and strong female characters, and the women here are excellent, chief among them Hilda Fay’s hard as nails, direct talking Bessie Burgess, and Kate Stanley Brennan is heartbreaking as Nora Clitheroe, falling into madness after her miscarriage and the death of her husband. Jack, a fine performance by Ian Lloyd Anderson. Phelim Drew is an excellent Fluther Good, bragging and surviving his way through the chaos, and John Currivan makes the most of his role as an embattled bar tender.
The transitions between each act are excellent, especially the collapse of the scaffolding between Acts three and four, and when the Irish soldiers dress in uniforms from the period, they provide a powerful counterpoint to the contemporary, the sound of port being poured into glasses has never sounded so threatening- hints here of what the production could have been had it stayed in its period. When the events of the Easter uprising are presented in Act Four, the arrival of British soldiers in contemporary uniform allows Holmes to invoke images of Bloody Sunday, and fears for the Good Friday agreement and Ireland’s borders following Brexit. That the production begins to soar is because of O’ Casey’s fine balance of comedy and tragedy, and in creating characters for which you care about their outcome.
I understand the production’s concern that mythology and romanticism surrounding the uprising may seem dated now, and I appreciate the attempts to debunk some of those myths by its contemporary urban style. For me, that throws me out of O’Casey’s beautifully constructed world, and there is so much humanity in each of his characters that we are always taken beyond stereotype. I’ve always preferred to watch a flaming failure than a safe success, and this Abbey Theatre production certainly belongs in the former, channelling and divisive, but also rewarding in places and interesting throughout.
