Old Play Off-Broadway

The Plough and the Stars (by Sean O'Casey) stands in the very first rank of modern plays. Among O'Casey's own, only Juno and the Paycock can challenge it; but though Juno has more memorable characters and richer comedy, its tragedy is dented with willful, stagy melodrama, where in The Plough and the Stars, tragedy and comedy are locked in an unshatterable embrace. In The Plough O'Casey found, if no better materials for tragedy, then an apter moment. Under the stress of turbulent historic events, amid the gunfire and bloodshed of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, O'Casey could release his anger and compassion alike, could expose the failings of his compatriots in the very act of exhibiting the fortitude. The immemorial heartbreak of For men must work and women must weep was to be mixed with a colder appraisal of the men themselves. They stand forth half-cocked and high-talking patriots, revolver in holster and glass in hand, while slum poverty stares out, and children grow tuberculous and die, and pregnant women are maddened with fear and worry, and it is the very Free-State-hating harridans who know how to hold firm and are able to help.

The Plough and the Stars is a properly orchestrated tragedy, but less a tragedy of war or even of civil war than of national character, of all that is left undone in working to achieve a great objective and then is too badly managed to achieve it. For O'Casey, even in 1926, there was still real use in crying over spilt blood. But, never gnawing a thesis, he made his tragedy vibrate with harsh humor and pulse with humanity.

Eminently deserving revival, The Plough should have a great Irish one. The Phoenix Theater's production lacks more than Irishness; it is not dramatic or revealing or resonant enough. The play does stir sleepily all evening, though it takes scenes of brawling to bring it really to life, or the great final curtain to assert its piercing ironic force.

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