The first run of Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, with its accompanying riots, was a little bit like the 1916 Easter Rising. The comparisons started on stage, where the play irreverently marked the Rising’s 10th anniversary.
Just like the Rising, the play started on a Monday (February 8th, 1926). It also took a while for the fighting to get serious and it was all over by the weekend, having already done enough to ensure long-term fame.
The at-times-farcical events were recorded by the diarist and critic Joseph Holloway, a drama lover of conservative tastes who never missed a Dublin play. Despite hating The Plough and the Stars, Holloway attended every night of its opening run and wrote about it in his diary.
If dramatic art was imitating life on this occasion, it had been the reverse 10 years earlier when Holloway, who was used to seeing theatre posters everywhere, saw a copy of the Easter Proclamation and thought it was just another poster.
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Of course, many of those who took part in 1916 had been playwrights, producers, and actors. With the GPO as their main set, it could be suggested they had staged a rising in more ways than one.
Anyway, as witnessed by Holloway, the opening night of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre was a relative triumph. There was “electricity in the air” beforehand. A long queue stretched down Abbey Street, of which only a quarter got inside the theatre.
At the end, there were calls for the “Author!” to be brought on stage, although Holloway noted one man’s quieter opinion: “The play leaves a bad taste in the mouth.” He also quoted the State film censor James Montgomery as saying he was glad to have been off-duty.
The puritanical diarist also contrasted the play’s sympathetic treatment of a prostitute, Rosie Redmond, with a scenario outside in which police chased four real-life Rosies. “[W]ho is not disgusted with such an exhibition when one chances on it [first hand]?” he asked.
On Tuesday night, as he wrote, the venue “was again thronged”. But this time, “four or five in the pit” – one of them Kevin Barry’s sister – objected loudly to the scene where volunteers bring the tricolour into a pub. Two policemen had, by now, been posted on the doors in an attempt to forestall a rush.
He also recorded more grumblings among celebrity members of the audience, including Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins, who lamented with sarcasm: “This is a lovely Irish export.”
But Holloway also overheard Oliver St John Gogarty, challenged to admit whether he liked the play, say he did: “It will give the smug-minded something to think about.”
By then, Gogarty had been immortalised as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. For the disapproving Holloway, however, Gogarty’s enthusiasm for the play was characteristic of a man “whose reputation for filthy limericks is very widespread”.
Of the Wednesday performance, Holloway confined himself to noting: “A sort of moaning sound was to be heard to-night from the pit during the ‘Rosie Redmond’ episode and when the Volunteers brought the flags to the pub.”
By Thursday, all theatrical hell had broken lose. “[A] great protest was made tonight, and ended in almost the second act being played in dumb show, and pantomiming afterwards.”
Women played a leading part in protests. During the first interval, when all was still calm, Dan Breen was overheard telling someone the audience included “Mrs Pearse, Mrs Tom Clarke, Mrs Sheehy Skeffington and others”. They were there in attendance “to vindicate the manhood of 1916″.
Once the vindicating started, audience members threw orchestra chairs onto the stage, while actors threw protesters off it. “Some of the players behaved with uncommon roughness to some ladies who got onto the stage and threw two of them into the stalls,” Holloway reported.
Amid the mayhem, WB Yeats made his famous “You have disgraced yourself again” speech to the audience. Canny PR man as he was, he later slipped around to The Irish Times offices with his script. The cynical Holloway reckoned Yeats paraphrased a version he heard from a female friend, “to try and have the report of the row doctored”.
By Friday night, the theatre was “detective-lined” and there were no disturbances before Holloway left at the end of act two. He still felt compelled to note he had passed a group of writers in conversation, including O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, Brinsley MacNamara “and others of the dirt cult”.
With equal disapproval, he observed that nobody was allowed stand in the aisles, to keep the way clear “for the ‘G’ men”. Such men were members of the Special Branch: a group, as he put it, “of evil fame in Ireland”.
The trouble rumbled on until Sunday, when there were more physical ejections from the stage. Barry Fitzgerald – later a Hollywood star – “had a stand-up fight with a man on the stage and succeeded in knocking him over into the stalls”.
Meanwhile, O’Casey was heard to respond to a crowd of questioning women with the line: “I want to make money!” This was damning, in Holloway’s view: [It] sums up his attitude towards art.”
Thus ended the week-long first run of The Plough and the Stars. As with the Rising, revivals were guaranteed.
