A century ago, playwright Seán O’Casey pinned a note over his desk in the dimly lit room he rented on the North Circular Road: “Get on with the Bloody play.” That play became the Plough and the Stars, which he completed in 1925 and sent to the Abbey Theatre, where it was first staged in February 1926. It caused heated controversy due to its depiction of the gulf between revolutionary rhetoric and action in 1916 and the reality of tenement life and death. It eschewed glorification of the rebels, and its language, according to one of the Abbey players writing to Abbey co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, was “beyond the beyonds ... at anytime I would think twice before having anything to do with it”.
O’Casey came late to writing, with his first play staged when h
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