Author: Ruben Kenig

Categories
Productions

Abbey Theatre Production of Plough and the Stars in Washington

Ian-Lloyd Anderson (Jack Clitheroe) and Kate Stanley Brennan (Nora Clitheroe) in The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey, directed by Sean Holmes.

Sean Holmes’ production of The Plough and the Stars for the Abbey Theatre has been a huge success at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC. Writing for The Washington Post Nelson Pressley writes,

It’s a grubby milieu that screams poverty and hardship, yet as always the O’Casey characters are joltingly alive. The production’s triumph is the fluid, splendidly balanced ensemble, which for harmony and power rivals any other cast seen in Washington this year.

He goes on to say,

[T]his vigorous performance, which will tour elsewhere in the United States later this year, convincingly reinforces the mettle of O’Casey’s great play.

Categories
History

Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Homes

By National Library of Ireland on The Commons (Flickr: No. 9 to Donnybrook) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Karl O’Neill writes in the Irish Times of taking a walking tour of the six houses Sean O’Casey lived at in Dublin. The tour starts at 85 Dorset Street and covers an area of just under a square kilometer of Dublin before ending at 422 North Circular Road where Sean wrote the plays of his Dublin Trilogy.

Place is an important part of any life. While Sean’s plays are very much about people, those people are the product of a very particular environment. We can’t travel back in time but we can traverse the same spaces.

Categories
News

The Silver Tassie in the BBC Radio 3 Minds at War Series

By Penti at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Playwright Elizabeth Kuti examines The Silver Tassie as part of the BBC Radio 3 Minds at War series. She looks at how the second act works to question the meaning of the war and how the final act places the meaninglessness of the war and its consequences back into the lives of the soldiers and their families.

Kuti goes on to put the play in context in Sean’s life looking at the rejection from W.B. Yates and support from G.B. Shaw as well as how the play fits in the context of other war plays including Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War! and Sarah Kane’s Blasted.