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.
Director Tom Creed brings a farcical emphasis to the opening act, set against a flimsy plywood wall in Jamie Vartan’s startlingly plain set design. Comedy is to the fore also in the pub scene, as the skittish Young Covey (Thommas Kane Byrne) bamboozles the sex worker Rosie Redmond (Caitríona Ennis) with Marxist slogans, while brawling women have to be lifted off the premises by the barman (Michael Tient).
At ease with O’Casey’s poetically embellished banter, the tremendous cast navigate the tonal switch into shock and tragedy, as the city is bombed, confusion reigns and pettiness evaporates. From roaring “Rule, Britannia!” from a window, her head bobbing like a crazed puppet, Bessie goes on to rescue the missing Nora, nursing her through mental collapse.
A gifted opera director, Creed adopts opera’s relaxed approach to period specifics here: the plywood walls suggesting cheap, badly built apartments today; characterless and makeshift. The final act unfolds on a completely stripped stage, a child’s coffin and two candles downstage, with Nora standing against the bare back wall, as if facing a firing squad. A departure from the familiar cramped attic, it creates a hauntingly stark and affecting image. Jettisoning faded Georgian surroundings de-romanticises poverty and deprivation, bringing it into the present – which seems a fitting way to reflect O’Casey’s socialist, anti-heroic perspective.
At Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 30 April
