The Plough and the Stars (12 page)

Without a doubt,
The Plough and the Stars
is O'Casey's greatest play. It is the one with the greatest intensity, the one which most ambitiously addresses the human comedy at the point where violent public events suddenly transform it into tragedy. It is the O'Casey play which tackles the greatest Irish theme, the fight for freedom, and humanises it with searing irony to equal the greatest critiques of war and peace to be found in literature, from Shakespeare's
Henry IV
to Bertolt Brecht's
Mother Courage and Her Children
.

The Plough and the Stars
was intended as a critique of the 1916 Rising, ten years on. By this time, the new Free State had got under way but in various elections the cause of Labour fell more and more behind. To one of O'Casey's socialist persuasion this signalled a betrayal of the workers' cause which he and Jim Larkin had striven to protect from 1913. When Jim Larkin returned from prison in the United States (where he had been sentenced as an ‘anarchist' for preaching socialism) in 1923 he tried to regain control over the Irish trade-union movement and instead felt the full resistance of the new men, comfortable in their secure, non-militant organisation. Larkin was made to feel a total outsider, was charged with embezzling union funds years earlier, and had to create for himself a rival trade-union organisation in the late 1920s. All of this confirmed for the embittered O'Casey that the new state was founded on bourgeois and not Labour principles. Looking back, he saw that the 1916 Rising was the clue to the problem.

This rebellion, undertaken through an alliance between James Connolly (who replaced Larkin as leader of the trade-union movement and chief of the Irish Citizen Army when Larkin went to America in 1914) and Pádraic Pearse, a teacher, a poet, a devotee of the Irish language and a prominent officer in the Irish Volunteers, was a total disaster. It took place in confusion, since Pearse and his supporters acted in defiance of higher orders to cancel the rebellion, orders that were in all the Sunday newspapers the day before the planned action, Easter Monday 1916. The Rising was thus a minor affair, confined to Dublin, and involved some 1,600 Volunteers and 300 members of the Irish Citizen Army. Pearse was the commander-in-chief, and he it was who read the proclamation of the Irish republic outside the General Post Office. By Saturday of Easter week all was over and Pearse surrendered. He and fourteen other leaders (including Connolly) were put on trial for treason and executed in Kilmainham jail in Dublin. They were quickly turned into martyrs by a population which had at first ridiculed the insurgents (the looting of shops in O'Connell Street which O'Casey depicts in
The Plough and the Stars
actually occurred, signifying the indifference of the poor people of Dublin to the lofty ideals proclaimed by Pearse across the street at the General Post Office). As the poet Yeats discerned (in ‘Easter 1916'), all was changed, changed utterly by the executions and ‘a terrible beauty was born'. As O'Casey read the situation, however, the 1916 Rising was the root of a succession of wars and acts of terror succeeded by the civil war of 1922–3, when those who had accepted the Treaty were opposed by those who saw it as a betrayal of 1916.

In O'Casey's analysis, the nationalist ideal was both romantic and dangerous. Labour's alliance with nationalism was, in his view, a tragic mistake which abandoned the cause of the poor and the unemployed. He was thus prepared to pour scorn on the whole 1916 endeavour as
fatally misguided. Its representation onstage was to shock audiences ill-prepared for this kind of satire.

On the fourth night of its first production at the Abbey Theatre, in February 1926,
The Plough
was greeted by riots of a similar kind to those which had greeted Synge's masterpiece
The Playboy of the Western World
in January 1907. The reception of O'Casey's masterpiece, accordingly, marked a crisis in the modern Irish theatre. Violent opposition to a playwright's vision threatens the very foundation on which art makes its stand, namely the free expression of individual feeling. O'Casey's vision resembled Synge's in this: both were satirists of pretence and hypocrisy. But O'Casey's point of view was far more political than Synge's and so the offence he caused to a section of the audience arose from his deliberate repudiation of nationalism whereas Synge, as W. B. Yeats memorably recorded, ‘was unfitted to think a political thought'.

Since the circumstances of the opposition at the Abbey Theatre throw some light on the play itself it may be worthwhile to provide a few details here. The problem began with the second act, where the prostitute Rosie Redmond sets the scene in the public house. This was a shocking innovation in itself, and clearly O'Casey intended to bring together in a spirit of mockery patriotism (outside the public house) and prostitution (within). When a member of the Abbey Board had objected to the character of Rosie some months before the production, Yeats himself was firm in her defence: ‘She is certainly as necessary to the general action and idea as are the drunkards and wastrels. O'Casey is contrasting the ideal dream [that is, the patriotic dream expressed by the Figure in the Window] with the normal grossness of life, and of that she [Rosie] is an essential part' (Lady Gregory,
Journals
). To his credit, Yeats insisted on Rosie's being left in the script. O'Casey's satire made itself felt on the audience as Act
Two progressed: the words of Pádraic Pearse used by the Figure in the Window were recognised, and the contrast between their high-mindedness and the low life and vulgarity of the working-class characters in the pub became increasingly obvious. The climax came when the three men in uniform, Clitheroe, Langon and Brennan, entered carrying the two flags of the combatant Irish forces, the tricolour of the National Volunteers and the plough-and-stars of the Irish Citizen Army. It happened that on the fourth night of the production there was present a large number of women closely associated with the ‘men of 1916', those who had fought, died, or had been imprisoned. The sight of the flags sparked off massive resistance to what was perceived as an insult to the patriot dead. ‘Women screamed and sang songs … A red-haired damsel in the gallery removed her shoes and flung them heatedly into the mêlée beneath.' Then the fight began in earnest:

Yeats then came forward to address the audience. Now at the height of his powers and loaded with honours (the Nobel Prize had been awarded him in 1923), Yeats spoke with great authority. He was a Senator in the upper house of the Irish Free State government; he was chairman of the Abbey's Board of Directors and its managing director; he was not only the voice of the Abbey Theatre but virtually the voice of liberated Ireland. And what he had to say was to recall the days of Synge's reception over
The Playboy of the Western World
and to rebuke the present audience: ‘You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an everrecurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Once more you have rocked the cradle of genius.' O'Casey's reputation was established, he said, through this negative and violent response. ‘This is his apotheosis.' (Lowery, p.
31
).

O'Casey had to look up ‘apotheosis' in his dictionary when he got home. To his surprise, he found that Yeats had placed him among the gods. Yet O'Casey knew all too well that to many people he was in the gutter, having betrayed the ideals of the 1916 Rising. As he left the theatre that night O'Casey was verbally abused by a group of nationalist women, who called him a traitor and a pro-Britain propagandist. ‘“Yes,” said one, leaning against the
wall, “an' I'd like you to know that there isn't a prostitute in Ireland from one end of it to th' other.”' (
Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well
, pp.
176
–7).

A public debate followed, first in the newspapers and then in a hall rented for the occasion on 1 March 1926. O'Casey's main opponent was Mrs Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, a suffragette and widow of the pacifist shot by a British soldier during Easter Week, 1916. She was a woman of considerable presence, who spoke on behalf of all women involved in the 1916 Rising, and she had much support at the debate. Her main point was that
The Plough and the Stars
was ‘a travesty of Easter Week, and that it concentrated on pettiness and squalor, unrelieved by a gleam of heroism' (Lowery, p.
100
). O'Casey replied as best he could, saying he had not tried to write about ‘heroes' and never would. Maud Gonne McBride, once Yeats's beloved, made the point that if O'Casey did not believe in heroes he should not have introduced a real one into his play in the form of Pádraic Pearse.

The issue was thus quite clear-cut: to the republicans and especially the women in that camp,
The Plough
was a disgraceful slur on those who had fought and died in 1916 and on that basis alone ought to be swept from the stage of the so-called national theatre. To O'Casey himself and his supporters,
The Plough
was great art and on this basis should be acclaimed, regardless of political considerations. Here was a play, however, where the art-versus-politics argument could never be resolved.
The Plough
is a political play; it is a modern history play. It is also a humanist play, in which characters and their fates appeal very strongly to audiences' feelings. The conflict between ideology and artistic achievement was and remains the major critical question surrounding
The Plough and the Stars
.

For O'Casey himself, the row over
The Plough
had lifelong implications. His
Juno and the Paycock
had been playing successfully in a London theatre since November
1925 and he was now invited over to supervise its transfer to a bigger theatre in March 1926. This would mark a major break with Dublin and the working-class conditions which had formed O'Casey as man and writer. He was aware what a big step it was, though at first he thought it would be temporary. He left Dublin on 5 March 1926 and was never again to return to live in Ireland. Thus
The Plough and the Stars,
which was to become an international success in due course, and the play most often revived at the Abbey Theatre, by its first reception brought to an end an important phase in O'Casey's career. His next play,
The Silver Tassie
(1928), would be rejected by the Abbey and would cause another great controversy. O'Casey settled in England and never again wrote for the Abbey Theatre. Thereby he lost a workshop and a body of actors to write for and to collaborate with. His exile was, in a way, tragic.

It should be obvious, after reading the play, that
The Plough and the Stars
is not structured along conventional lines. A well-made play would have developed from an opening situation into a domestic crisis, then into complications with various threats to happiness, until the ‘obligatory scene’ was reached and the expected confrontation took place, leaving only the dénouement of the plot to take place in the closing scene. In
The Plough and the Stars
there is no single plot as such. True, we join the young Clitheroe couple in the opening scenes and form the impression that the play will deal with their love and fortunes in the face of imminent political crisis. But O’Casey did not write in this way.
The Plough and the Stars
is actually more extreme in its avoidance of conventional dramatic form than either of O’Casey’s previous plays (
The Shadow of a Gunman
and
Juno and the Paycock
).

Act Two, in fact, is the key to the structure because, even though he avoided the form of the well-made play, O’Casey, as artist, had to provide the form which would best accommodate the content of his play. Act Two was originally a one-act play entitled
The Cooing of Doves
, submitted to the Abbey in the early 1920s and rejected. When he began to write
The Plough
in October 1924, then entitled
The Easter Lily Aflame
, what was in O’Casey’s mind, he says, was that he had already written a play about the ‘Black-and-Tan period’ (1920) and a play about the Irish civil war (1922–3), ‘but no play yet around the period of the actual Easter Rising, which was the beginning of all that happened afterward’ (Ayling,
Casebook
, p.
139
). So that became his theme, and he allowed
it to grow and combine in his mind with such symbols as the Irish flag, the tricolour, and the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, the plough-and-stars. ‘I never make a scenario [plot outline], depending on the natural growth of a play rather than on any method of joinery’ (Ayling,
Casebook
, p.
140
). He brings the two flags together in a public house, while outside the meeting takes place, corresponding to the actual meeting on 25 October 1915 which reconciled the Volunteers (under Pádraic Pearse) and the Irish Citizen Army (under James Connolly). In particular, the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, symbolising the workers ever aspiring to higher things, gave O’Casey his theme. ‘It was this flag that fired in my mind the title for the play; and the events that swirled around the banner and that of the Irish Volunteers … that gave me all the humour, pathos and dialogue that fill the play’ (Ayling, Casebook, p.
139
). The structure thus grew from a central idea: the betrayal of the cause of Labour by the delusion of romantic patriotism. (This betrayal was even more clear when Labour failed to gain support in elections following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922.) Because of this thematic approach, the play does not suffer when Nora Clitheroe and her family problems are left out of Act Two. That act, O’Casey tells us, was filled largely by the rejected
The Cooing of Doves
: ‘It went in with but a few minor changes’ (Ayling,
Casebook
, p.
140
).

The key to Act Two, and thus the key to the structure of
The Plough
as a whole, lies in the juxtaposition of two totally contrasting worlds of experience. This is how O’Casey as playwright usually got his best effects. In this instance, the outside world of high-minded politics, articulated by the Figure in the Window, is violently brought into contact with the inside world of ordinary people satisfying basic human appetites. This collision releases a powerful delivery of irony. It is not that O’Casey mocks the speeches of the Figure in the Window: it is
worth noting how the people in the pub often praise his words and respond with enthusiasm (‘It’s th’ sacred thruth, mind you, what that man’s afther sayin’,’ p.
35
). The real point is that this enthusiasm is a form of intoxication, or, looked at the other way, the pub is a metaphor for the political response of the working class to idealistic rhetoric.

When the fighting begins in the pub, first between Mrs Gogan and Mrs Burgess and then between the Covey and Fluther, we have to see these battles as something of a parody of the great fight for freedom being eulogised by the Figure in the Window. Thus, the juxtaposition of high and low ideals is comic and provides the structural means for O’Casey to expose the dangerous inadequacy of the Figure’s language and doctrine.

After Act Two the action returns to the domestic concerns of Nora Clitheroe and from this point to the end what we witness is tragic displacement. As the Rising breaks out and Nora goes in search of her husband Jack, the contrast is heightened between two sets of values, the domestic and the militaristic. The domestic values include fertility, the bringing of new life, as in Nora’s pregnancy; the militaristic values include bloodshed, the destruction of life, as in Lieutenant Langon’s wounds and the corpse that Nora describes, where ‘every twist of his body was a cry against th’ terrible thing that had happened to him’ (p.
61
). If we are reading the play adequately we will notice that Nora’s pregnancy/fertility carries forward the motif of Mrs Gogan’s baby in Act Two, embroiled in a battle that is comic there but deadly serious in Act Three. Nora’s premature baby joins Mollser in the coffin in Act Four, underlining the waste and needlessness of such infant mortality.

O’Casey’s way of organising the action, then, is to run several little plots at once, overlapping and repeating themes and motifs, and through these parallels and contrasts moving the main action along, which is the ill-fated attempt by Nora to keep her family together and to expand it.

In this pattern of repetitive action the use of space should be noticed. In complete defiance of the common description of his dramatic art as realistic, O’Casey increasingly used symbolism and other anti-realistic forms. The pub in Act Two and how it is combined with the exterior scene of the political meeting has already been commented on. The space onstage is in this way used in a style one would have to call
expressionistic
: that is, the Figure in the Window (who remains unnamed) looms up as if from a dream and invades the space of the public house with his voice and blurry presence. This is not realism, but a more experimental and more effective mode of staging the action.

Act Three, indeed, transfers to the streets, and the space provides an image of people very much ‘on the outside’, powerless, removed from both the fight for freedom (which does not concern them) and from any share in the material wealth of society. When the Woman from Rathmines briefly enters this space we see vividly, if briefly, what a dead end, what a vacuum, it is: she desperately needs to escape to the safety of her middle-class suburb. By this time the looting has started, and the deprived people’s need to steal in order to have a lifestyle equal to the middle class is vividly seen in Mrs Gogan and Mrs Burgess allying to bring home consumer goods of all kinds. A carnival spirit contrasts sharply with the background of the Rising, and O’Casey’s Elizabethan style of staging allows these two actions to go on at the same time without a change of scene: the entrance of the three soldiers, with Langon badly wounded, underlines the success of this staging method here.

Then Act Four brings us to Bessie Burgess’s dingy flat at the top of the tenement. Here, the symbolism is all too apparent: the apartment has ‘
a look of compressed confinement
’ (p.
78
). The space symbolises a trap, ‘
poverty bordering on destitution
’. It is the end of the line. Here
Nora is displaced, out of her element, out of her home, and out of her mind. The setting allows this tragic stage of the action sharp definition. The coffin onstage in such a confined space, which the men use as a card-table, is a powerful image. It is waiting to be taken out; so too are the men; the surprise is that Bessie is also to be removed, dead, and the space finally occupied by the two British soldiers. The outside world of militarism thus finally invades and takes over the inside world of domestic safety, and the action is complete. The setting, the staging, the image of the soldiers sitting to drink the tea Nora made for Jack and their joining in the song outside, provide a masterly unification of theme and action. We see here, if we haven’t seen it already, how O’Casey weaves together the various strands of the action so that there is finally created a devastating and ironic effect. This converging on the final image of the fire within, the fire without, the song without matched by the song within, concentrates the viewer’s or reader’s response in such a way that she or he is moved by the tragic destruction, the pincer movement of events, which has befallen the helpless residents of this symbolic tenement house.