‘It’s the All-Ireland final of theatre’: The Plough and the Stars, 100 years on from its riotous first run

The same week that Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars opened at the Abbey Theatre in February 1926, the Free State government was setting up a “Committee on Evil Literature”.

Comprising three laymen and two clergy – Catholic and Protestant – it met for a year before concluding that existing obscenity laws were insufficient to deal with the threat from certain books, newspapers and magazines. The results included a Censorship of Publications Act, under which many authors would be banned.

Decades later, in 1958, O’Casey (by then long exiled to England) effectively banned his own work from Ireland for a time after Archbishop John Charles McQuaid objected to his then latest play, The Drums of Father Ned.

But as The Plough and the Stars went into rehearsal just before Christmas 1925, amid much sensitivity about its treatment of the Easter Rising, O’Casey fought for his work line by line in the Abbey itself, sometimes against attempted censorship by the cast.

The actress Eileen Crowe, for example, refused to utter the scripted sentence: “I had never a child that was not born within the boundaries of the Ten Commandments.” FJ McCormick meanwhile took umbrage at a single word: “snotty”.

A bigger problem, everyone agreed, was the bawdy ballad to be sung in the original text by the prostitute Rosie Redmond. That included the lines: “I once had a lover, a tailor, but he could do nothin’ for me,/An’ then I fell in with a sailor as strong an’ wild as the sea./We cuddled an’ kissed with devotion, till th’ night from th’ mornin’ had fled;/An’ there, to our joy, a bright bouncin’ boy,/Was dancin’ a jig in th’ bed!”

Michael J Dolan, the actor who played Young Covey, considered its inclusion “impossible”. O’Casey conceded reluctantly that it would “offend thousands”. The song was dropped.

[ Abbey Theatre riots: All theatrical hell broke loose at The Plough and the Stars 100 years agoOpens in new window ]

In a letter to the director Lennox Robinson on January 10th, 1926, the author sounded an exasperated note: “The play itself is (in my opinion) a deadly compromise with the actual; it has been further modified by the [Abbey] Dire