Rising star

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey looks at the Irish nationalist movement during the events of Easter 1916. The setting is a Dublin tenement where the residents exchange gossip and insults and sometimes punches. What begins as an elevated soap opera develops into a tragedy of vast and harrowing proportions.

Sean Holmes’s production was first seen at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and it tells the historic tale with contemporary costumes and furnishings. These chronological confusions rarely work but the performers here have so much spirit, energy and truthfulness that the narrative feels immediate and topical. The set is spare, unlovely, brutal. A scaffolding rig and a few rough wooden flats are ingeniously configured to create a pub, an apartment, a Dublin street, and a besieged attic. O’Casey sets out to show how the febrile atmosphere of civil war can unleash sub-conflicts between neighbours and families. We meet newly-wed Nora who conceals a letter summoning her husband to serve in the militia.