Sean O’Casey’s masterpiece, is a slice of Dublin tenement life during the Troubles and leading up to the Easter Uprising in 1916.
The Abbey Theatre audiences on the fourth night of its original run in 1926 did not take kindly to the Irish being represented as cowards, looters, windbags, drunkards, prostitutes and, most shocking of all, mothers who brought their babies into a pub and the forgot them and left them there. But it was the Irish Citizen Army flag (the plough and the stars) being brought into a pub which set off the riots.
Jeremy Herrin and Howard Davies’s production switches from farce to tragedy and back again seamlessly and especially in the memorable third act with the dying (serious) and the looting (comic) side by side. The play is saved from melodrama by the intensity of the feeling and the humanity of the characters, so vividly realised.
The play is deeply moving. Who would have thought the coward Fluther Good (Stephen Kennedy) would have risked his life for anybody? Who would have thought the termagant Bessie Burgess (Justine Mitchell) would take Nora (Judith Roddy) who has lost husband, baby and mind, into her own home and look after her?