by Sean O'Casey
And, of course, in Act Four we see the extent of Bessie’s charity and generosity when she mothers, nurses and protects the damaged Nora in her own cramped apartment. Bessie is killed trying to preserve Nora’s life, and the Christian strength of her action is by no means undermined when Bessie reverts to her earlier scorn for Nora as she realises she has been shot on her account. Her use of the word ‘bitch’ here (p. 96) was rightly defended by Yeats as ‘necessary’ when the unofficial censor tried to remove it from the script: ‘the scene is magnificent and we are loth to alter a word of it’ (Lady Gregory, Journals). The word was retained. It is part of the proof that O’Casey’s representation of Bessie was not sentimental but realistic.
In his portrayal of Bessie, then, O’Casey is careful once again to ensure that she remains ambivalent. As Ayling justly remarks (p. 186), ‘We neither admire nor despise her indiscriminately, for her heroic stature is enhanced, though never exaggerated, by seeing her character in perspective.’
The ambivalences and contradictions O’Casey introduces into his characterisation in The Plough provide just the sort of distancing which allows the reader/spectator to see the play critically and to appreciate what Jack Lindsay (p. 193) calls its ‘full dialectics’ – that is, how the clashing ideologies within this society are seen in their irreconcilable conflict.
REFERENCES
Agate, James, ‘The Plough and the Stars (1926)’, in Sean O’Casey: Modern Judgements, ed. Ronald Ayling, London: Macmillan, 1969, pp. 79–81.
Ayling, Ronald, ed., O’Casey: The Dublin Trilogy: A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp. 171–87.
Gregory, Lady Augusta, Lady Gregory’s Journals, Vol. 2, Books 30–44, ed. Daniel J. Murphy, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987, 20 Sept. 1925, pp. 41, 42.
Lindsay, Jack, ‘The Plough and the Stars Reconsidered’, in The Sean O’Casey Review, 2.2 (1976), pp. 187–95.
Language
O’Casey’s language is both realistic and poetic. Although this is a paradox it is probably the key to understanding O’Casey’s procedures. On the one hand the Abbey tradition was predominantly realistic, using onstage the speech of the Irish people in all its regional and dialectical forms. A glance at P. W. Joyce’s English As We Speak It in Ireland (1910) indicates what this means. English spoken in Ireland is historically inflected: as the language of the coloniser it retained a lot of words, phrases and pronunciation dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. O’Casey’s language records and elaborates Dublin speech.
The Plough exhibits a richness of speech in two quite different ways. One is through expansion of a statement for special effect beyond what is strictly necessary. An example is Nora’s heated response in Act One to Jack’s sexual advances: ‘It’s hard for a body to be always keepin’ her mind bent on makin’ thoughts that’ll be no longer than th’ length of your own satisfaction’ (p. 26). This is a rather poetic way of saying, ‘It’s hard to say the right thing,’ but Nora’s way of putting it neatly turns realism aside in favour of alliteration (mind … makin’ … longer than th’ length’ …) and euphemism (‘sexual satisfaction’). Another example is Fluther’s advice to Mrs Gogan in Act Two to ignore Bessie Burgess: ‘Th’ safest way to hindher her from havin’ any enjoyment out of her spite, is to dip our thoughts into the fact of her bein’ a female person that has moved out of th’ sight of ordinary sensible people’ (p. 42, emphasis added). This simply means, ‘It’s best to ignore her completely’, but the beauty of the speech lies in the adept cultivation of more words than are strictly necessary. Looked at more closely, Fluther’s speech uses a powerful metaphor (‘to dip our thoughts’), but the metaphor keeps sliding into clauses that seem, but refuse, to clarify it (‘the fact of her bein’ a female person that …’). It is rhetoric which delights through its ornateness.
The language used in the play is often hyperbolic in this way: it uses excess for effect. Uncle Peter’s language is piled high with unnecessary words which nevertheless provide a wonderful rhythm and sense of exaggeration: ‘I’ll leave you to th’ day when th’ all-pitiful, all-merciful, all-lovin’ God ’ll be handin’ you to th’ angels to be rievin’ an’ roastin’ you, tearin’ an’ tormentin’ you, burnin’ an’ blastin’ you!’ (p. 15). The sentence builds up to the word ‘God’, and seems a patient prayer, but then it turns around and calls for the ‘angels’, when Peter secretly means ‘demons’, to torture the Covey without mercy. The whole speech is a comic about-turn which reveals the vindictiveness of the hypocritical Peter. His use of alliteration within phrases coupling verbs of destruction (tearin’ and tormentin’, etc.) provides delight to the audience.
Peter is not alone in being gifted with this ornate language. Virtually all of the characters within the tenements use this energetic speech as if it were their main resource in an economy which deprives them of real power. Peter curses eloquently simply because he can take no action. Language is power to these characters. Its power is sometimes comic, as when Fluther remarks, ‘when you’d look at him [Peter], you’d wondher whether th’ man was makin’ fun o’ th’ costume, or th’ costume was makin’ fun o’ th’ man!’ (p. 41). But the language is usually aggressive as well as comic. Indeed, the language is most often funny because the purpose is aggressive: these characters are nearly always verbally sparring, because they can’t usefully engage in any action.
There is a second type of speech in The Plough and that is the more carefully constructed long speech. Here O’Casey was probably influenced by the use of the ‘set speech’ in Shakespeare. Because O’Casey’s characters greatly admire language and frequently use it expertly to put down or displace others, it follows that they also admire a good speech themselves. This is part of the Irish tradition, found also, for example, in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Thus when the Figure in the Window begins his address – ‘It is a glorious thing to see arms in the hands of Irishmen’ (p. 34) – the response in the pub is immediate. Rosie describes the words as ‘sacred thruth’; the Barman says if he was a little younger they would send him ‘plungin’ mad into th’ middle of it!’ (p. 35). Peter and Fluther are physically affected by the rhetoric, intoxicated by it even before they touch a drop of whiskey. Fluther describes the speeches as pattering on the people’s heads like rain falling on corn, generative, stirring and productive. In short, the political rhetoric is moving. O’Casey lets these speeches from the Figure in the Window (all four of them) have their own effect: he does not put them into dialect spelling, and he does not suggest that they are in any way ironic. He allows them their formality, their high style, and he allows them their powerful effect.
This effect culminates in the strange, incantatory, religious language of the three soldiers who enter with the flags towards the end of Act Two. Having heard the Figure’s speeches outside, they are stirred to die for Ireland. They agree that Ireland is greater than a mother and greater than a wife. Hearing now the final speech, an excerpt from Pádraic Pearse’s oration over the grave of the Fenian hero O’Donovan Rossa, the three soldiers are in a state not just of fanaticism but of dangerous ecstasy as they pledge themselves to die for the independence of Ireland: ‘So help us God!’ (p. 53). The point is that the political rhetoric has aroused political madness. O’Casey establishes this point through equating language with intoxicating liquor. Nora’s anti-war speeches in Act Three should be looked at as rhetoric answering the speeches of the Figure in the Window.
A different example of the longer speech is seen in the ‘flyting match’ in Act Three between Mrs Gogan and Bessie Burgess. A flyting match was a medieval debate which could become violent. We have a good example when Mrs Gogan and Bessie argue over who has more right to appropriate the pram (for the purposes of looting). Consider Mrs Gogan’s speech which begins: ‘That remark of yours, Mrs Bessie Burgess’ (p. 67); the point she has to make is that the pram was left in her care. Mrs Burgess retaliates with the point that Mrs Gogan’s complaints about the pram as an obstruction disqualify a
ny claim she has to its use. Both speeches are metaphysical: they are plainly empty rhetoric. It is like the jargon used by negotiators in an industrial dispute: language as smokescreen for self-interest. The fact that the two women form an alliance and go out sharing the pram underlines the power of language once again. Each woman may have been speaking nonsense but having failed, like wrestlers, to gain a knockout, they agree on a draw and share the spoils. O’Casey uses this farcical moment to draw out the comic side of difference. In a parody of the alliance between the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army he shows how practical self-interest with a material end in view is far more meaningful to the deprived classes than theoretical debate. Language as a form of looting is gleefully celebrated.
A final and different example is what in classical drama is called the ‘Nuntius’s speech’. Towards the end of a tragedy a messenger usually enters to announce what has happened to Oedipus or Agamemnon or whoever, inside the palace. A long speech is delivered, full of details calculated to stir the hearts of the audience and prepare them for the final speeches of lament from the chorus. In Shakespeare’s plays the messenger’s speeches are shorter because violence has already been seen onstage (the description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet might be an exception). In all three of his Dublin plays, O’Casey makes use of the ancient Greek convention of a Nuntius who relates solemnly how one of the main characters – Minnie Powell, Johnny Boyle, Jack Clitheroe – met her or his death. In Act Four of The Plough Brennan describes the so-called noble end of Jack Clitheroe in language stuffed with conventional platitudes. O’Casey here insists on puncturing the description by having Bessie pour scorn on Brennan’s own cowardice, and yet the conventional picture remains to contrast with Nora’s demented state. Mrs Gogan has two such formal speeches in Act Four (pp. 89, 98).
It is worth noting here that language is shown up as finally inadequate; the play ends in stalemate. The song that the British soldiers sing merely repeats what the Figure in the Window called for: men to leave hearth and home to fight for their country. The major irony – and all of O’Casey’s tragi-comedies end ironically – is that the ‘home fires’ are burning now in Dublin, but burning in destruction and not in domestic security. Because of the Ireland–England divide, the language held in common finally breaks down over the meaning of ‘home’, the very thing Nora Clitheroe cared most about. Her mad speeches show how dislocated she, as representative Irish woman, now is after the Rising. Her delusion that she is at home waiting for Jack is presented as something non-verbal: Brennan is told to look at her, to ‘see’ the way she is (pp. 83, 85), and how incapable she is of being told, of being given the truth in words. The image of Dublin burning thus challenges language and confronts the audience with the tragic irony of ‘keeping the home fires burning’.
REFERENCE
Kearney, Colbert, The Glamour of Grammar: Orality, Politics and the Emergence of Sean O’Casey, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Performance
The Plough and the Stars is the most frequently staged of O’Casey’s plays and therefore his most successful in performance. It should be remembered that the disturbances at the Abbey in 1926 happened only on the fourth night of the first production; although the play was controversial, it was popular. Productions in London (1926) and New York (1927) were equally well received by the critics, although always, from those premières down to revivals in the 1980s and 1990s, there have been critics who see the play as scrappy, melodramatic and lacking in clarity of theme. Of course, it is the task of the director to bring out the coherence and clarity of the play onstage.
The worst kind of production presents The Plough as an aimless entertainment, as if the characters exist in a television situation comedy where there happen to be militaristic noises offstage. But the key to watching or reading The Plough lies in the progressively intense rhythm of events. Every play has a rhythm. It may seem merely to ‘unroll’ in a series of haphazard and varied events, but if it is well written it will organise these events in a design which accumulates like a dynamic jigsaw. It has to be dynamic, because the design cannot be merely pictorial. What happens onstage (which in reading we must try to visualise) is as much like an extended piece of music as it is a picture being completed. As in music, there are slow parts and quick parts, sudden shifts from soft to loud notes, chords which sound themes which will repeat again and again, and a constant beat which holds the whole piece together as it moves towards a climax. In reading The Plough we must discover this rhythm. It may help to study the way Act Four brings to a harsh closure many of the themes sounded in Act One. If the reader looks closely at Act Four they will notice that the mood is now very different from Act One. In contrast to the lively spirits, the energy of teasing, abuse and delightful sense of life, Act Four is sombre, tense, watchful, the characters constantly having to subdue outbreaks of dispute lest Nora’s rest be disrupted, while the presence of the coffin onstage sets the tone for a disturbing sense of death.
A useful way to study this rhythm is to break down an act into micro-units, or what in American theatre are called ‘beats’. A beat is a scene within a scene just long enough to contain its own energy. Each beat has its own purpose. For example, in Act Four the first beat is concerned with the card game. While the three men play cards, they discuss what happened to Nora: the game provides a focus for concentration. This is far better than if the three men simply sat around talking. The ritual of card-playing paves the way for Nora’s ritual of making tea: these normal activities actually increase our sense here of abnormality. The card game, as such, does not matter. Far more important are Mollser’s death, Nora’s loss of her baby, and Nora’s breakdown. By means of the ritualistic card game, then, O’Casey supplies a chorus on the tragic action.
In the next beat Bessie enters to silence the men arguing over the cards. This little scene conveys a sense of urgency and anxiety. We see Bessie in a new light – that of nurse and protector. A third beat follows with the entrance of Brennan, who is looking for Nora. His purpose gives a tension to this little scene: he has a message to deliver. The need of the others to protect Nora from any further bad news means an intensification here of the atmosphere of anxiety generated by the opening of Act Four, with its very important stage directions.
The rhythm is thus building up moment by moment, tightening the screws, so to speak, until the British soldiers enter. Brennan’s presence is a threat to the safety of the other three men. The fourth beat, however, comes with Nora’s entrance just after Brennan’s account of Clitheroe’s death and his sentimental assurance that Nora will be proud when she knows ‘she has had a hero for a husband’ (p. 83). Bessie corrects this view with the declaration that a sight of Nora would disprove any such idea, and it is at just this moment that Nora enters. The purpose, then, is for Nora visually to offset Brennan’s prediction and in that way to get the audience to sweep away all militaristic propaganda and to invest feeling instead in Nora’s victimhood, Nora’s representative status as tragic sacrifice.
Some critics have thought the echo of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in her mad scene too obvious here, too much of a distraction. But this is not, or ought not to be, so. Madness on stage is a visual matter: it is ‘ostension’ or showing in iconic form the alienated state of a pathetic figure. When, in this fourth beat, Bessie remarks, ‘isn’t this pitiful!’ (p. 84) the audience’s response is being carefully directed. Fluther points out to Brennan what Nora’s derangement signifies: ‘Now you can see th’ way she is, man’ (p. 85, emphasis added). The Covey repeats this formulation after Bessie leads Nora off again: ‘Now that you’ve seen how bad she is …’ (p. 86). The audience has seen the same thing, and so is actively implicated. A good play will involve the spectators in just this way, the performances on stage combining with this visualisation. They form an ensemble or group concentrating on the deepening mood.
The fifth, brief, beat records Brennan easing himself for protection into the circle of the three card-players. Th
is is followed by the sixth beat when Corporal Stoddart enters. Here the mood shifts abruptly to danger; his purpose is to get the coffin out and do a surveillance of the occupants of the apartment. He is led by the Covey into a discussion of socialism and child mortality versus the perils of warfare. The one detail revealed in this scene is that the Rising is nearly over and was never more than a dog-fight (p. 88). The sound-effects of a sniper’s bullet and the eerie cry of ‘Ambulance!’ immediately throw the Corporal’s summary into ironic question. He resolves to find the sniper, and the tension is given another heightening twist. The seventh beat comes with Mrs Gogan’s arrival to supervise the removal of the coffin, and here the mood expands to arouse sympathy for her and admiration for Fluther. The beats which follow relate to Bessie’s angry assertion of her Protestant identity to Corporal Stoddart, Peter’s old irritation over the Covey’s teasing, and Fluther’s comic acceptance of incarceration in a church so long as the men may play cards.
All of this unrolling action has to be seen as the careful dramatisation of a closing in, a closing down on the people. A constant sense of unease is maintained. In the ninth beat, after the sniper has struck again and Sergeant Tinley has entered in anger, the men are roughly evacuated in a mood of defiance, paving the way for Bessie and Nora’s last scene. As before, Bessie is asleep when Nora enters, except that now a street battle is raging offstage and the sense of danger is acute. Bessie’s wrestling with Nora results in Bessie being shot directly in front of the window that is upstage-centre, theatrically a commanding position. When the Abbey actress Marie Kean played the next, twelfth, beat in the 1966 television production of The Plough she made Bessie’s death-scene remarkably moving. This is the only death actually witnessed in the course of a play where many die offstage; therefore, the performance of Bessie’s death (as representative and as, again, something seen) is crucial to the effect of the ending. Marie Kean prolonged the death-scene (rather as Laurence Olivier prolonged the death of Richard III) so that her every movement, her twisting and crawling, communicated agony and desperation. The audience could not but feel both pity and terror here, as tragedy demands. The death of Bessie marks the absurd and yet the one truly heroic moment in this anti-heroic play, and caused O’Casey much trouble in the writing. Thus its performance is a matter of considerable importance if the effect is to be properly cathartic.
