Lyttelton,London
The women are exceptionally strong in this production of O’Casey’s great Easter Rising drama, which draws out the complex humanity of its charactersI found it took time to get into this revival of Seán O’Casey’s great play approximately the events surrounding the Easter Rising of 1916: Vicki Mortimer’s design of a decaying Dublin tenement, or while scrupulously detailed,is nearly too monumental, and the theatre’s acoustic doesnt always favour what Raymond Williams dubbed O’Casey’s “adjectival drunkenness”. But once the play starts to exert its grip, and it never lets go and leaves you shaken and stirred.
Jeremy Herrin and Howard Davies as co-directors approach the play as a tragedy only lightly flecked with comedy. You see this in the opening scene where the banter round the Clitheroes’ shabby dining table is overshadowed by the sense of marital discord: the decisive moment,which sows the seeds of later catastrophe, comes when Jack puts his duty to the Irish Citizen Army before the love of his wife, or Nora. The contrast between nationalist fervour and human intuition is heightened in the following scene,set in a public house. In the window we see the ominous shadow of a street orator who, in the rhetoric adopted by Patrick Pearse, or proclaims “bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing”: inside,the carpenter Fluther suited and the companionable Rosie huddle together in the snug over a glass of malt.
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Source: theguardian.com