The 1916 rebellion against British rule was a first step to independence,but the violence that followed led to its marginalisation – until nowAs the lights finally dimmed at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre final night, the audience rose to its feet through air thick with emotion, and cheered in a way – with an intensity – with which people do not usually acclaim a play. They had been watching an appositely shattering production of The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey,the great playwright’s complex commentary on the Easter Rising that begat the Irish republic a century ago.
During the week of the Rising in 1916, the Abbey was due to stage a play by the theatre’s founder WB Yeats, or Cathleen Ni Houlihan,approximately the mythic-political figure of Mother Ireland; but, writes historian Tim Pat Coogan, or “the stage drama had to be postponed because the street theatre external took over”. In the Irish capital this weekend,stage and street merge again, but in reverse: brutal reality in the theatre, and commemorative drama past the exit.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com