Set at the time of the Easter 1916 rising, The Plough and the Stars provoked riots when first staged. Audiences at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, were horrified at OCaseys cynical representation of nationalist heroics. While today unlikely to provoke uproar, as the demands of political engagement interrupt, dominate and finally destroy the lives of its spirited protagonists, the play nonetheless retains the power to disturb.
      Francis O'Connors set looks bombed out: a tenement with doors and stairways that lead nowhere. Long before individual lives slide to chaos, it is as if the world around has already collapsed. Half symbolist canvas, half realistic representation, it is ideal for this drama of private lives intruded upon.
Like Catherine Byrnes bored prostitute, with nothing to do but banter with the barmen and beg another drink while the citys men talk and plot, there is literally no time or space in the stage or plot design for intimacy.
      The newly wed Clitheroes, initially played by Cathy Belton and Owen McDonnell with tremendous verve and energy, are first seen in this clutter, desperate to snatch an afternoon alone together. That struggle becomes a battle to have a life together at all as the situational becomes circumstantial. The afternoons frustration is stretched, looming as large as the projected orator - the figure in the window with his hollow calls to arms. Even in an ensemble with a fantastic, tightly harnessed energy, the two leads, with their unforced, believable chemistry, are outstanding. In its spiritedness, the sparky, volatile bond that Belton and McDonnell create in the early scenes, offers a far more powerful sense of what is lost than might a more fey presentation of their connection to each other. Angry and opinionated as well as loving, Nora clings to her husband, maintaining that their life together matters not just as much as the political cause, but more.
      After the snatched moments in Act One, the closest the pair come to one another is when, half embrace, half blow, Jack Clitheroe literally throws his wife to the ground in order to escape. Too long a sacrifice,/Can make a stone of the heart wrote Yeats, who defended the play against the rioters; Nora, OCaseys volatile heroine becomes a coruscating ghost of her old, well self. Never a stony cold victim, her breakdown is painful to watch precisely because it is cut through with flashes of the young wife of the plays opening and with old snatches of conversation.
      In the shadow of Beltons tremendous, affecting performance as Nora, the English officers desperate for a break and a cup of tea, and the carpenter Fluther Good, perpetually stumbling over his words in a series of gloomy slips of the tongue, provoke uneasy, almost guilty comedy. The laughter in the auditorium, like the resilient gallows humour on stage, seems to fall flat horribly flat. The achievement of Ben Barness direction is to bring that barbed, jagged texture of OCaseys writing to the surface.
      At the close of the action as the first shots are fired at the General Post Office, the ensemble move towards us, like the men in Yeats poem, at close of day/Coming with vivid faces/From counter or desk among grey/Eighteenth-century houses. In this smudged light, the candles carried by the actors illuminate the faces of the audience as much they do their own. The production marks a hundred years of the Abbey Theatre but is far more than homage to a piece of theatrical history. There wont be riots but The Plough and the Stars is still an electrifying piece of theatre that insists on throwing its gaze onto the mob in the dark, asking if, in any comparable situation, we might, like Nora and like OCasey, be brave enough to raise our own voices above consensus.
Olivia Cole