The Plough and the Stars

by Sean O'Casey

  O’Casey’s way of organising the action, then, is to run several little plots at once, overlapping and repeating themes and motifs, and through these parallels and contrasts moving the main action along, which is the ill-fated attempt by Nora to keep her family together and to expand it.

  In this pattern of repetitive action the use of space should be noticed. In complete defiance of the common description of his dramatic art as realistic, O’Casey increasingly used symbolism and other anti-realistic forms. The pub in Act Two and how it is combined with the exterior scene of the political meeting has already been commented on. The space onstage is in this way used in a style one would have to call expressionistic: that is, the Figure in the Window (who remains unnamed) looms up as if from a dream and invades the space of the public house with his voice and blurry presence. This is not realism, but a more experimental and more effective mode of staging the action.

  Act Three, indeed, transfers to the streets, and the space provides an image of people very much ‘on the outside’, powerless, removed from both the fight for freedom (which does not concern them) and from any share in the material wealth of society. When the Woman from Rathmines briefly enters this space we see vividly, if briefly, what a dead end, what a vacuum, it is: she desperately needs to escape to the safety of her middle-class suburb. By this time the looting has started, and the deprived people’s need to steal in order to have a lifestyle equal to the middle class is vividly seen in Mrs Gogan and Mrs Burgess allying to bring home consumer goods of all kinds. A carnival spirit contrasts sharply with the background of the Rising, and O’Casey’s Elizabethan style of staging allows these two actions to go on at the same time without a change of scene: the entrance of the three soldiers, with Langon badly wounded, underlines the success of this staging method here.

  Then Act Four brings us to Bessie Burgess’s dingy flat at the top of the tenement. Here, the symbolism is all too apparent: the apartment has ‘a look of compressed confinement’ (p. 78). The space symbolises a trap, ‘poverty bordering on destitution’. It is the end of the line. Here Nora is displaced, out of her element, out of her home, and out of her mind. The setting allows this tragic stage of the action sharp definition. The coffin onstage in such a confined space, which the men use as a card-table, is a powerful image. It is waiting to be taken out; so too are the men; the surprise is that Bessie is also to be removed, dead, and the space finally occupied by the two British soldiers. The outside world of militarism thus finally invades and takes over the inside world of domestic safety, and the action is complete. The setting, the staging, the image of the soldiers sitting to drink the tea Nora made for Jack and their joining in the song outside, provide a masterly unification of theme and action. We see here, if we haven’t seen it already, how O’Casey weaves together the various strands of the action so that there is finally created a devastating and ironic effect. This converging on the final image of the fire within, the fire without, the song without matched by the song within, concentrates the viewer’s or reader’s response in such a way that she or he is moved by the tragic destruction, the pincer movement of events, which has befallen the helpless residents of this symbolic tenement house.

  REFERENCES

  Ayling, Ronald, ed., O’Casey: The Dublin Trilogy: A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp. 171–87.

  Characters and Themes

  By the time he came to write The Plough and the Stars O’Casey well understood the primacy of characterisation in drama. This is not to deny the importance of ‘action’, but it is to declare quite emphatically that O’Casey’s plays are not plot-driven but character-driven. Technically, what O’Casey does breaks the rules of good dramaturgy – a playwright isn’t supposed to introduce a character once only and never even have her mentioned by another character: witness Rosie Redmond, seen only in Act Two. A more glaring example is the unnamed Woman from Rathmines, who has no more than one page of text in Act Three and is never seen or heard of again. Even O’Casey himself, a stout defender of his experimental style, later condemned this episode. The Woman, he wrote in The Green Crow (1956), ‘had neither rhyme nor reason for being there; a character that was in every way a false introduction; one who could have no conceivable connection with any of the others from the play’s beginning to the play’s end’ (p. 9). But this character is not usually omitted in production because, like Rosie Redmond, she throws light on the realities of Irish life in the period in which The Plough is set. The Woman from Rathmines is an extreme case, but her inclusion indicates how O’Casey understood characterisation. In general, his characters exist to show something rather than to do something: we see what they stand for, not in the sense that we see immediately that Rosie Redmond is a prostitute but in the sense that she is dependent on men, that she is exploited by her landlord, that she is one of the defenceless whom the Rising will ignore and fail to help.

  Characters in O’Casey do not do much; they are not agents of action in the conventional dramatic sense. Like characters in Dickens’s novels or in some comic parts of Shakespeare’s history plays (because O’Casey’s Dublin plays are really history plays), O’Casey’s characters are on the margins of great events rather than in the thick of them. What we see is how they cope with their powerlessness. Usually, they cope by inventing and sustaining eccentricities of manner and speech which force others in the community to beware and to make space for them. Once given that space – and a character like Peter Flynn is perpetually complaining that he is not given this space – an O’Casey character will settle into a performance of the invented role rather than actually do anything which changes the situation.

  Therefore, in The Plough and the Stars for the most part one has characters who jostle for the space in which to perform the role that brings each of them compensation for loss of social and economic status. Thus Mrs Gogan, for example, whose voice is the first one we hear in the play, is a widow with many children to support, one of whom is the dying Mollser and another a baby, and yet Mrs Gogan is a curious, busy-body type who takes pleasure in the spectacle of death. There is, of course, something comical about this macabre side of Mrs Gogan, but the point to be made is her need to avoid the realities of her own economic position. She invents things: she decides that the delivery of Nora’s hat is a sign of Nora’s snobbery. But we soon learn that the hat is a present from Jack and so is not a sign of Nora’s self-indulgence at all. When it comes to Mollser’s consumption, because there is nothing she can do for her, Mrs Gogan prefers to believe Mollser is getting better. When she is told at one point that Mollser ‘looks as if she was goin’ to faint’, she is quick to snap back, ‘She’s never any other way but faintin’!’ (p. 70). Mrs Gogan fights with Bessie Burgess for the perambulator only to use it for looting: this is the only action she takes and it is a significant one. Rising or no Rising, she has to feed and clothe her family and will steal to do so. She is finally ‘in her element’ when Mollser dies, as Fluther notes: ‘mixin’ earth to earth, an’ ashes t’ashes an’ dust to dust, an’ revellin’ in plumes an’ hearses, last days an’ judgements!’ (p. 87). This ‘performance’ element is a part of her character.

  It is also a part of the characters of Uncle Peter and the Covey. Each of these is a caricature or two-dimensional type, exaggerated for amusement. Each exists mainly – like characters out of Dickens – to maintain endlessly the provocative and/or irritable responses they show from the very outset. One would have to say, however, that the Covey, for all that he is a caricature of a swaggering know-all, is to some extent O’Casey’s spokesman on the political meaning of the play. One can instance three occasions where this is so:

  (1) In Act One the Covey accuses the Irish Citizen Army of bringing disgrace to the flag, the plough-and-stars, because it was a Labour flag and ought not to be associated with a middle-class nationalist revolution such as the Volunteers were planning.

  (2) When the Figure in the Window (Act Two) praises war as a glorious thing, which had already brought ‘
heroism’ back to Europe in World War I and which must be welcomed in Ireland as the ‘Angel of God’, the Covey dismisses this idea as mere ‘dope’ (p. 43). He goes on to repeat this charge to Fluther (p. 48), and a row develops. Whereas the Covey is a troublemaker, and is satirised as a socialist fanatic, O’Casey actually shared the Covey’s belief about Pearse’s speech. Therefore, the Covey is useful in the play as a counterblast to Pearse’s romantic nationalism.

  (3) In the last act, when the Covey preaches to the English soldier about the evils of consumption arising from the capitalist system, Corporal Stoddart concedes the point and adds that he is a socialist himself but has to do his duty as a soldier nevertheless. The Covey argues that the only duty of a socialist is the emancipation of the workers, and when Stoddart replies that one has to fight for his country just the same we get the telling question from Fluther: ‘You’re not fightin’ for your counthry here, are you?’ (p. 88), thus pointing up the false analysis made by this confused Englishman, whose nationalism, like the nationalism of the Irish Volunteers, has taken precedence over socialism and has left problems like consumption unsolved.

  The Covey is therefore responsible for injecting into the play the major agon or debating point on which the tragedy depends, for O’Casey’s own analysis was that the 1916 Rising was a mistake so far as the Dublin working class was concerned. The Clitheroes, standing for that class, are destroyed because of the nationalism to which Jack Clitheroe gives service (and his life). It is ironic that the irritating Covey, who is an armchair socialist and a bore, should nevertheless be the one to point up the flaw in the ideology driving the combatants.

  O’Casey’s representation of Jack Clitheroe differs from his more detailed characterisation of Nora, Fluther and Bessie, the three main characters in The Plough. It is obvious from the outset that Clitheroe’s involvement in the fight for freedom is governed more by personal vanity than by political principle; both Mrs Gogan and Nora herself comment on his vanity. When Clitheroe switches from amorous stay-at-home to stern authoritarian in Act One it is only because his promotion in the Irish Citizen Army was kept secret by Nora. When he enters in Act Three in the midst of the Rising, the first thing Clitheroe says to Nora is that he wishes he had never left her (p. 72). Just as Bernard Shaw revealed the harsh realities of battle through the professional soldier Bluntschli in Arms and the Man (1894), so O’Casey exposes the frightening realities of revolution through the experience of Clitheroe. To this extent O’Casey’s theme and purpose are pacifist. He brings out this theme much more fully in his characterisation of Nora. Meanwhile, Clitheroe is shown caught up in a romantic battle fuelled first by fanaticism and then by fear. His character disappears under the rubble of the Imperial Hotel, whose destruction Brennan graphically describes in Act Four. Brennan tries to transform Clitheroe’s terrible death into a heroic end, but as Bessie Burgess points out Clitheroe was simply abandoned in a burning building (p. 83). O’Casey’s insistence on stripping Clitheroe of heroic status is a major part of his pacifist theme.

  Nora Clitheroe is presented in a more complex way than Jack or any of the minor characters. In the best drama, characters are both admirable and the opposite; at times we sympathise and at other times we are repelled. On the one hand Nora is clearly ambitious, a woman with drive and energy who is determined to get out of the tenements as soon as she can build up the means; hence the two lodgers in a small apartment. She has aspiration to middle-class status: she talks much of ‘respectability’ in Act One as among her primary aims for the household. All of this angers Bessie Burgess and fills Mrs Gogan with contempt (‘“Many a good one”, says I, “was reared in a tenement house”,’ p. 7). Nora expresses one of the major themes in the play when she emphasises the importance of the home and the need both to protect it and help it to prosper. As the play opens Nora is employing Fluther to fix a lock on her door – a move which Bessie sees as an insult to her personally – and this is symbolic. Nora needs to shut out trouble from the home. Mollser admires Nora’s abilities as home-maker and wonders if she herself will ever be strong enough ‘to be keepin’ a home together for a man’ (p. 31). This purpose might strike us today as somewhat sexist but the representation of women as nurturers and home-makers is crucial to O’Casey’s mode of thinking. It is a premise or a given of this play, in particular, that masculine and feminine values are sharply differentiated: war and destruction of life are here destructive of the home, fertility and new life.

  Nora in this regard has a symbolic function. She stands for everything that is not death-bringing and is life-preserving. In Act Three we see clearly Nora’s hatred of war as the agent of destruction of domestic life. Her passion makes her see only the fear and ‘cowardice’ of the combatants, ‘afraid to say they’re afraid’ (p. 61). The women who opposed The Plough and who rioted on the fourth night saw Nora as the enemy, the spokesperson for O’Casey’s anti-republicanism. But O’Casey deliberately allows Nora to become hysterical and to become excessive in her feelings against the Rising: this is her character, not O’Casey’s propaganda. And he allows Mrs Gogan – of all people – to counter Nora’s charge of the men’s cowardice: ‘Oh, they’re not cowards anyway’ (p. 61). We sympathise with Nora but we feel she goes ‘over the top’ in her reaction. Similarly, in Act Four, we are mainly sympathetic towards Nora in her broken state but we see, too, that she causes the death of Bessie Burgess. Nora’s weakness creates tragic conflict. She chooses to chase out after Jack in the battle, which causes the miscarriage which in turn loses her her sanity; her best efforts fail to save Jack and that scenario is tragic by any definition. What we must conclude is that Nora is at times irritating and at times entirely sympathetic. Her humanity resides in this contradiction, and makes her all the more impressive as a dramatic creation.

  The critic Ronald Ayling refers to O’Casey’s skill in ‘distancing’ his major characters and this is what we find with Nora, Fluther and Bessie. They are not allowed to win our unqualified approval. On the contrary, for much of the play Fluther and Bessie are presented negatively. From the start Fluther is the common man: friendly, tolerant, amusing, but with a weakness for strong liquor. One of the first London critics of The Plough, James Agate, referred to Fluther as ‘Falstaffian’, and the description has stuck because of its aptness. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is larger than life, robust, irresponsible, fond of drinking, Lord of Misrule, and not only witty in himself but the cause of wit in others. Fluther shows in Act Two how Falstaffian he can be, and is rewarded with Rosie Redmond’s company as he leaves the pub. In the argument with the Covey, Fluther may not show intellectual superiority but he wins our hearts through his sheer unwillingness to be overcome by scientific jargon. In Act Three his Falstaffian nature is plainly on view when, ignoring the glorious cause which set his blood boiling in Act Two, he returns stone drunk from looting and cries out his defiance and indifference: ‘Th’ whole city can topple home to hell, for Fluther!’ (p. 76). Finally, he fails Nora in her hour of need when he is incapable of going to fetch a doctor. He is thus anything but a hero; he is more the comic braggart thrown into a tragic situation. Thus we are ‘distanced’ and forced to see Fluther’s faults alongside his attractions.

  This ‘distancing’ method is combined with what Ronald Ayling calls O’Casey’s ‘balancing’ of the dramatic action. There is no dominating character in The Plough, because O’Casey wanted always to present the group, the community, as the dramatic focus. Individual characters dominate for a scene or so and ‘are then firmly distanced before they can disrupt the balance of the whole’ (Ayling, p. 178). Thus Fluther – like Nora – is at times admired (for example, when he brings Nora safely home), and at other times blamed (as when he is too drunk to help further). In Act Four we see Fluther standing up bravely to the aggressive Sergeant (p. 93), and here the better side of his character is again on view. Yet this is the same Fluther who swallows down his looted whiskey as if there were no tomorrow: ‘If I’m goin’ to be whipped away, let me be w
hipped away when it’s empty, an’ not when it’s half full!’ (p. 81). Against that amusing self-indulgence we must place Mrs Gogan’s tribute to Fluther’s help with the funeral arrangement for Mollser (p. 89). He is thus a tissue of contradictory qualities, and in a strange way these contradictions make him seem more rather than less convincing.

  Bessie Burgess is the greatest example of O’Casey’s skill in characterisation in The Plough. Introduced as a termagant, Bessie is provided with a history which renders her political attitude as meaningful as her social aggression: she is presumably widowed – no Mr Burgess is ever mentioned, and from her rebuke to Mrs Gogan in Act Two about ‘weddin’ lines’ (p. 44) it is likely there was a Mr Burgess – and she has a son fighting the Germans in Flanders and about to return home with a shattered arm (p. 90). Bessie stands out, then, as a loyalist, a Protestant unionist, in a community predominantly Roman Catholic and separatist. Her courage marks her out when she opposes the Easter Rising by flaunting the Union Jack from her window and singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the top of her voice (p. 60).

  But courage aside, there is a marvellous wholeness about Bessie Burgess, a mixture of hostility and generosity, aggression and tenderness, cruelty and uncommon kindness. She confronts Nora for her air of superiority in Act One and Mrs Gogan for her breach of decorum in bringing a baby into a public bar among men. She is a fighter, literally in Act Two, verbally in Act Three (over the pram), and at most other times. But with Mollser she is kind and gentle: ‘she gives a mug of milk to Mollser silently’ (p. 62). The ‘silently’ is typical. When Nora is in trouble towards the end of Act Three it is Bessie who first goes outside and carries her in, and then risks life and limb to go for a doctor in spite of her personal dislike of Nora – actions speak louder than words.