Irish rebellion in-yer-face or consigned to history: Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 2016

ABSTRACT

This article considers two revisions of Seán O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars (1926) for the 2016 centenary commemoration of the 1916 Rising in Dublin: Sean Holmes’s robust new version staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; and Howard Davies’s powerful yet sensitive production at the Lyttelton Theatre in London. These productions displayed contrasting directorial perspectives. Whilst Holmes emphasised serious social issues among those living below the poverty line in Dublin in the 2010s, Davies recreated the historical environment of 1916, reflecting the original context of O’Casey’s play from 1926. As this article argues, the two productions are not only important for their historic value but also because they reflect two major trends in contemporary British theatre: in-yer-face extravagance and historical documentarism. The article concludes by exploring the cultural and political significance of the expression ‘Waking the Nation’ (the title of the Abbey Theatre’s centenary programme, in which Holmes’s production appeared), and in particular its relation to these two revisions of The Plough and the Stars, a play originally written for the tenth anniversary of the Easter Rising that took place between 24th and 29 April 1916.

KEYWORDS:

• Seán O’Casey
• Sarah Kane
• in-yer-face theatre
• documentary theatre
• British and Irish theatre
• Easter Rising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Celtic Tiger period refers to a period of economic boom and financial stability in Ireland that saw sustained high-level economic growth, low inflation levels, low unemployment, and budgetary surplus. The period started with the launch of Ireland’s Programme for National Recovery in 1987, which stabilised Irish national debt by 1990. However, the economic boom period only started with the creation of a single internal market (SEM) within the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. Ireland was successful in channelling financial aid from the European Structural and Investment Funds, as well as attracting foreign investment from the United States of America and the United Kingdom. At the same time, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast in April 1998, bringing an end to the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and creating a stable political environment for economic growth on the whole island of Ireland. The new Irish government of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, with Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, between 1997 and 2007 was instrumental in creating economic and political environment. This period of boom came to a sudden halt when the world economy was hit by the financial and banking crisis of 2008 that first hit the banking sector of the United States of America (Ní Mháille Battel 2003, 99–102; Ó Riain 2014).

2. According to Census 1996, approximately 30,000 non-nationals were living in Ireland, mostly from nations of the European Union (France, Germany, and Italy). 0.81% of the population of Ireland were non-nationals (Central Statistics Office 1996). According to Census 2016, 535,475 non-nationals were living in the country, from 200 different nations around the world (including Poland, Brazil, Nigeria, and India), which was close to 12% of the population of Ireland (Central Statistics Office 2017). The highest number of non-nationals resided in Dublin, Fingal, and Galway, with approximately 20% of residents recorded as non-national (Central Statistics Office 2017). At the beginning of the Celtic Tiger period, Ireland’s population was a little over 3.6 million, and by 2016, its population has grown to over 4.6 million. During these decades, 50% of the population growth in Ireland − 500,000 people – was the result of the steady increase of the number of non-national residents (Central Statistics Office 1996, 2017).

3. The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ refers to the genocide of Bosniak Muslims in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War that took place on the Balkan Peninsula between 1992 and 1995.

4. Apart from UK nationals, Polish, Nigerian, and Lithuanian nationals have the highest number of residencies in Ireland. Census 2011 – which provide a more detailed account than Censuses 1996, 2002, and 2006 – recorded the following: the number of Polish nationals increased from just over 2,000 in 2002 to 122,000 in 2011; the number of Lithuanians increased from a little over 2,000 in 2002 to nearly 40,000 in 2011; and the Nigerian community had just under 9,000 members in 2002 and nearly 18,000 in 2011 (Central Statistics Office 2012). There were around 320,000 non-national residents in Ireland in 2011, a number that increased to over 530,000 in 2016.

5. During the Celtic Tiger period, Ireland’s was the ‘fastest growing economy in the world’ (Sweeney 1998: 1), and was ‘ranked as the fourth richest country in the world, with a per capita GNP exceeded only by Luxembourg, the United States and Norway’ (Ferriter 2005, 663). Creation of new jobs was on the rise, and wages, social allowances, and benefits grew significantly, as did general purchase power (Ferriter 2005, 674), and unemployment figures were down to 3.9% in 2001 (Shinnick 2013: 57).

6. Ní Mháille Battel (2003) discusses in detail the differences between the Ireland of the 1920s and the 2000s. During the Celtic Tiger period ‘Irish living standards […] went from 66% of EU-12 average in the 1990s to 140% of the EU-25 average by 2004’, there was a ‘significant growth in Irish exports […] with immigration helping to fill labour shortages’, and there was steady improvement of infrastructure, most significantly roadbuilding (Shinnick 2013: 57). Shinnick and Ferriter, however, also draw attention to the downsides of the rapid economic growth that brought social changes to Ireland: the housing and credit bubble (Shinnick 60–61); the inequality in redistribution of wealth, the tax cuts favouring international corporations and the wealthy (Ferriter 2005, 663) and ‘refugees and asylum seekers were often subjected to much the same prejudice that had been shown towards native marginalised groups in Ireland’ (Ferriter 2005, 664).

7. Botham is referring to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the evolution of human history had come to an end with the general acceptance of neoliberalism as a guiding principle of economic and political philosophy following the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989).

8. Harry Heegan is the main character of Seán O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1929), who is a young soldier of the British army from Dublin. Heegan joins the British war effort during the Great War to fight on the Western frontline in France in the stern belief of imminent victory. Heegan is portrayed as a disabled war veteran in the last two acts of the play, clearly struggling to come to terms with the change in his circumstances. Moran notes that in earlier manuscript sketch of the play, Heegan was named ‘Jack’, bearing the same first name as Captain Jack Clitheroe in The Plough and the Stars (Moran 2013, 257).

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.