The Plough and the Stars review – Seán O’Casey’s Dublin drama hits 100 with haunting staging

Bar-room banter … (left to right) Caitríona Ennis as Rosie Redmond, Matthew Malone as the Figure in the Window, Michael Glenn Murphy as Peter Flynn, Dan Monaghan as Fluther Good and Michael Tient as the bartender in The Plough and the Stars. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

Marking the centenary of the premiere of Seán O’Casey’s potent political drama, the Abbey’s latest production opens a door to looser, more experimental ways of staging it. Frequently produced in recent years, the tragi-comic work that caused a riot in 1926 is now embedded in the Irish theatre canon.

It is set among Dublin tenement dwellers in the run-up to the Easter Rising of 1916, and O’Casey’s characters are caught up in events beyond their control. Try as she might, the newly married Nora Clitheroe (Kate Gilmore) can’t persuade her husband Jack (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) to stay home rather than joining an Irish Citizen Army rally. Nor can she keep the outside world at bay, with her neighbours, the absurdly morbid Mrs Gogan (Kate Stanley Brennan) and hard-drinking Unionist Bessie Burgess (Mary Murray) bursting in constantly, with no privacy possible.