Deserting the Starry Plough - O'Casey revisited

Sean O'Casey called one of his three greatest plays after the flag of the Irish Citizen Army - the Starry Plough. But O'Casey himself had deserted those colours out of wrong-headedness, vanity and bad politics. This inner conflict may have helped him to be a great dramatist and part of the attraction of his work is addressing the mass of contradictions with which he presents us.

Republicans demonstrated at the Abbey when the The Plough and the Stars was first performed in 1926. The demonstration was not as violent or as vicious as it was later made out to be and in fact O'Casey was able to debate with some of the republican women who took part immediately afterwards behind the scenes.

In some ways it is surprising that the play did not meet even more opposition. The sight of the Tricolour and the Starry Plough being flaunted in a pub by Volunteers amidst copious quantities of whiskey in the company of a prostitute, while the words of Pádraig Pearse were relayed from outside, was inflammatory indeed. Remember this was less than three years after the end of the Civil War. Yet the play was revived nearly every year afterwards by the Abbey and won the acceptance and admiration of Irish people at home and abroad - republicans included - as great drama.

The success of the Plough was a success for artistic freedom and the capacity of the nation for self-criticism. With The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock it makes a classic trilogy forged in Ireland's revolutionary years and among Dublin's working class. It was not the audience rebuked by Yeats ("You have disgraced yourselves again" he told the protesters at the Plough) who issued the rejection that led O'Casey to emigrate. That dubious distinction goes to Yeats himself, who rejected O'Casey's Silver Tassie because its innovative style did not conform to his notion of drama. And in politics O'Casey was close to the Dublin republicans who demonstrated, but a world away from Yeats, who was a fascist sympathiser and forged close links, shortly after their establishment, with the Blueshirts.

It was Frank Ryan who organised the protests but Ryan later expressed his appreciation of O'Casey as a writer and, as a socialist republican in the 1930s, he was on the same side as O'Casey in many causes. Nonetheless the question remains, if O'Casey had not broken with the Citizen Army and had gone on to play a part in the struggle, what kind of drama, if any, would he have produced? Certainly participation did not prevent other writers from producing - the likes of Sean Ó Faoláin, Peadar O'Donnell and Joseph Campbell, to name but a few.

It seems that O'Casey was not cut out to last very long in any organisation. He was extraordinarily self-reliant and self-confident, a product of a keen mind and a canny instinct for survival. But the downside was an arrogance and an intolerance of the opinions of others. He left the Irish Citizen Army, of which he was a founder member, in a fit of pique because they would not expel Countess Markievicz. O'Casey disapproved of her co-operation, and that of other Citizen Army members, with the Irish Volunteers. There is much fine writing in his autobiographies but there is also much self-justification and for O'Casey, it seems, self-justification was not possible without the most sustained character assassination. James Connolly is one of those targeted as is O'Casey's fellow writer AE (George Russell).

It is very likely that O'Casey's politics were greatly influenced by feelings of guilt at non-participation in the revolution which he had long called for. He was to claim that this was not the revolution he had sought and his castigation of Connolly for joining what he wrongly characterised as a 'bourgeois' Rising in 1916, was later to be echoed by others, fulfilling Connolly's own prophecy that many socialists would not understand his actions. But O'Casey had less excuse for doing so than most. His views were seized upon later by two-nationists, revisionists, Stickies and Trotskyists, a motley crew with which he had little in common.

In The Plough and the Stars O'Casey uses the words of Pádraig Pearse out of context, presenting him as a purveyor of blood sacrifice who mesmerised young Dubliners and led them to their deaths, albeit in a play which also satirises the British Army. Yet in his autobiographies he praises Pearse highly. The contradictions abound.

None of this takes way from the greatness of O'Casey's drama. Flawed though it may be, it is as flawed as human nature and humanity is the keynote of his work. This is clear in the fine production of The Plough and the Stars currently playing in the Abbey. The cast conveys the richness of O'Casey's dialogue and the sets are superb. It is worth seeing for Owen Roe's performance as Fluther Good alone.


By Micheál MacDonncha.