Abbey Theatre on tour with O’Casey classic

The Abbey Theatre’s production of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, directed by Olivier award-winning director Sean Holmes, comes to Galway’s Town Hall Theatre next week.

The play, which opened in the Abbey in March, is currently in North America, where it was performed in Washington this week as part of that city’s events to mark the 1916 Rising.

The Plough and the Stars and its author Sean O’Casey are indelibly linked with the Abbey and this play is part of Irish theatrical history – when it premiered in the Abbey in 1926, the audience famously rioted.

The Plough and the Stars has been revisited many times since then, on the Abbey stage and elsewhere. Now, 90 years on from its contentious premiere, the Abbey is offering audiences a chance to take a fresh look at this story of ordinary lives ripped apart by events of the time.

In the play, residents of a Dublin tenement shelter from the violence that sweeps through the city’s streets as a revolution that will shape the country’s future rages outside. They can only wait and see what that future will bring.

“An essential part of our understanding of 1916”, is how the Abbey’s Artistic Director Fiach MacConghail described The Plough and the Stars, which was a highlight of the Abbey Theatre’s Waking the Nation centenary programme.

“It is important that we revisit the complex history of that time in order to understand who we are today,” according to MacConghail, who added that The Plough and the Stars was a great play in that “it is urgently concerned with its own time and yet it remains fiercely contemporary”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.