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The Theater: Dubliners Undaunted

2 minute read
T.E. Kalem

THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS

by SEAN O’CASEY

Dust settles on most national treasures. Theaters that were vivid and inspiriting in their legendary youth subside into enervating routines in middle age. Perhaps the same show must not go on for too long.

That seems to be the case with Ireland’s Abbey Theater, now returned to the U.S., at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for the first time in 38 years and touring on to Boston and Philadelphia. The Plough and the Stars is O’Casey’s second-best play; his ineffable masterwork is Juno and the Paycock. This production might well be called The Plough. It is workmanlike but never, for a moment, lyrically incandescent.

The scene is a poor, bedraggled Dublin district during the doomed 1916 Easter Week Rebellion. O’Casey had no illusions about that sadly absurdist affray. Commandant Jack Clitheroe (Clive Geraghty) of the Irish Citizen Army is a crackbrained patriot who is willing to die for his country but not to live for it. The Dublin tenement dwellers are represented as drunken, excitable souls, passionately unified by a nationalistic cause.

The men are blathering romantic idiots; the women, even when they carry on like fishwives, are spunky realists with a gift for endurance.

The Dublin dialect, while invariably musical, is sometimes irritatingly impenetrable. In a troupe that plays well, but not always together, Cyril Cusack stands out as a sly, roguish charmer. Siobhan McKenna, a woman seemingly larger of spirit than any role she fills, makes Bessie Burgess a matron of blood, steel and tears. T.E. Kalem

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