This study guide is intended for students taking examinations in English literature, drama or theatre arts at GCE Advanced (A2) and Advanced Supplementary (AS) level. It may also be of general interest to students of modern theatre in general and the plays of Sean O'Casey in particular. Please use the hyperlinks in the table above to navigate this page. If you have any comments or suggestions to make about this guide, please contact me.
This guide is written to support your study of The Plough and the Stars. The guide indicates the terms in which examiners will expect you to understand the play. It should be used in conjunction with study of The Plough and the Stars in performance, as far as possible, and of the text in one or more editions designed for study at your level.
The play is effectively in two halves: Acts One and Two (in November 1915) look forward to the glorious citizen-led liberation of Ireland.
In Acts Three and Four (Easter 1916) reality has imposed itself - we see the suppression (predictable and irresistible) of the citizen uprising.
The opening scene or episode seems shapeless - a cameo of normal life: we see Mrs. Gogan's snooping, comments on Nora, the teasing of Peter. Both Fluther and Mrs. Gogan refer to the Nationalist rising, and the Covey's arrival brings hot news of the evening's demo. We see first of Peter's quarrels with the Covey - both characters are comic, but Peter more obviously so: while the Covey is a political bore, Peter is a posturing coward.
The next entrance is Nora's - she appears to have influence over these four, but is intimidated by Bessie. Fluther's exit leads to tea-scene - Nora presiding, Peter and Covey sparring. These leave - and we see an apparently intimate scene. But this is shattered by Brennan's revelation and Nora's confession. Jack leaves the real (?) woman for the mythical Shan Van Vok/Cathleen ni Houlihan.
The act is naturalistic in
The act serves to establish character and give background information. It seems that focus of play is to be the Clitheroes - but this is less clear in subsequent acts (not at all in Act Two, from which Nora is absent).
This was originally a single-act play which stood alone, called The Cooing of Doves . It is not clear that O'Casey has integrated it into the longer structure of the four-act play. The main episodes are these:
In the middle of this scene, which ends with Fluther's leaving with the prostitute who sings a bawdy song, we have the solemnity of Brennan, Langdon and Clitheroe, as if in religious liturgy, declaring that Ireland is greater than wife or mother, and embracing death for her independence. Which is the right course? That of Fluther or that of Clitheroe?
The act works by juxtapositions - notably that of Pearse's speech against the events inside the pub. The comic, colloquial but natural speech of Fluther and company contrasts with the rabble-rousing oratory of the fanatic. Pearse's words stir up the simple, who do not wholly comprehend, but make of them what they want to hear. Who makes history? The demagogue, Pearse, or the ordinary people he inspires to bravery or folly?
This act is set in the Clitheroes' home - inside and out. The time is dusk in Easter week, months after Act Two. Mollser is comforted by Jenny Gogan - she is dead within days (before Act Four). The main episodes are as follows:
This act is set inside Bessie's living room. The time is dusk again, a few days later. Mollser has died, Nora has had a stillbirth and Clitheroe is also dead, unbeknown to her.
These include, among other things:
The play purports to represent authentically the speech and behaviour of the characters. They use lively, vivid colloquialism, colourful speech, malapropisms (Fluther's derogatory) and regional accent.
Actions, exits and entrances appear uncontrived - most pointedly, to reassure the audience, at the start, where Fluther mends a lock and Peter wanders around half-dressed while his shirt airs. By comparison Act Four is more economical, though it opens with card-playing and small-talk.
Events are presented in relation to many characters (as in modern naturalistic television soap-opera). The audience's interest is in various characters at various times: Nora, Bessie and Fluther principally.
Vincent De Baun (in O'Casey and the Road to Expressionism ) argues that the lack of a central protagonist is an expressionist device, but this argument is unconvincing as De Baun concedes that O'Casey has created an ordinary group of people whom we see trapped by circumstance.
More to the point are De Baun's comments on Act Two. Pearse's speech is broken into short passages, each contrived to coincide with what occurs within. His fanaticism reflects Peter's and Fluther's shallow alcohol-induced patriotism, or, in the middle, the liturgy of Clitheroe, Brennan and Langan.
In Act Four the tendency is clearer - note timing of cry of Red Cr. oss or the sounds of gunfire with events within. In this act there is a pattern of songs and chants and noises:
O'Casey chooses not to present directly the leaders of the movement, nor even to present on stage the rebel attempts to overthrow British rule. We hear one of the leaders (Pearse, in Act Two) but only have parts of his speech. The fighting around the Dublin post office is described (but not depicted), as is Jack's death. The only action we see is Bessie's shooting. Lighting shows the glare of the burning city through windows - but always the fighting is outside.
However, when the soldiers arrive on stage in Act Four the outside world has entered the Clitheroe home. From its symbolic protection the four men are taken away to face public retribution for the actions of their countrymen (one of whom, Brennan, has been passed off as a non-combatant).
O'Casey cares what is the effect of Pearse's and Connolly's words on ordinary, limited and fallible people. Some - Peter, the Covey and Fluther - may be briefly roused but keep out of the rising as far as they can (though they may exploit it by looting). Others - Clitheroe, Langan and Brennan - are persuaded by Pearse's seductive oratory.
Neither group is admirable:
O'Casey implies that the spokesmen of liberty have inspired simple people to get themselves shot, while others who have not taken up arms have also been embroiled in suffering - shown, most extremely, in the shooting of Bessie. She rejects the Shinners and all their works, while her son could easily have fought in the same battles as Stoddart and Tinley.
The characters in the play are all living in straitened circumstances - Nora's affectation of gentility does not hide the fact that she is almost as poor as her tenants. To poverty are added other problems - Mrs. Gogan's consumptive husband and elder child, Bessie's worry about her son's welfare, Nora's uncertainty of her husband, the mutual contempt of Peter and the Covey. Only Fluther seems reasonably content. Life is a struggle already. Defiance of British rule - meant to lessen their troubles - greatly increases them. Thus it is naturalistically improbable but symbolically necessary, for Mollser's death to occur when it does.
O'Casey, perhaps aware that the ordinary person is, like Everyman, non-existent, and inappropriate to naturalistic drama, thus depicts the variety of characters we think of as ordinary people or representative types. The variety is clear (but may seem contrived) and thus allows for types like Bessie and the Covey who could not, singly, stand for the ordinary person in Dublin (as being a protestant or communist, say). Our idea of a decent, ordinary person is nearest to Fluther, perhaps.
Contrast in the play can be seen in terms of character, outlook, speech and strength, among other things.
O'Casey continually pairs or groups characters of different outlook - either in conversation together (Fluther and the Covey, the Covey and Rosie) or on stage in different conversations : Clitheroe, Langan, Brennan opposed to Rosie and Fluther. This use of contrast is explicit in Act One where Nora tries to reconcile warring male characters but is herself thrown into sharper relief by Bessie's verbal attack.
A character's outlook or conduct may express or contradict his or her personality (frequently the latter - Bessie's theoretical intolerance against her practical charity, Fluther's avowed prudence against his real courage, Peter's posturing against his cowardice). But in dialogue, their outlook causes some characters to adopt combative stances and leads to verbal sparring about these differences:
In Act Two we see the huge difference between the speech of the pub, which is colloquial and ungrammatical but presented as having a basic honesty, and the stilted rhetoric of Pearse - the one is bound up with life and affirms love and pleasure ; the other deifies death, sacrifice and bloodshed . The one does no harm; the other does great harm.
In Act Three Bessie taunts Brennan with reminders of his usual occupation. His lofty rank means nothing - he remains what he is - good only at choking fowl. Stoddart and Tinley are, in rank, vastly below the position of captain - they are N.C.O.s. But their rank, in a regular army, does mean something. They are professional soldiers. Peter dresses in a colourful outfit and sports a sword - leading to jokes about his canonicals or regimentals (uniform of a religious or military person). Stoddart is described in a lengthy stage direction - what he carries is the modern (for the time) equipment of an expert soldier. Brennan, by now, has shed his uniform - the would-be soldier is revealed as a frightened civilian. The deaths of Langan (we suppose) and Clitheroe have cured him of his taste for adventure. But Tinley's response to Private Taylor's death is to get on with his work with heightened brutality. Fluther, commenting on Tinley's complaint that the Republicans are not fighting fair, in fact reinforces this idea: the British have greater numbers, more and better equipment, horses and artillery as well as proper training and experience. In effect O'Casey says, through Fluther, that the rising is doomed to failure. On stage Tinley and Stoddart are part of an irresistible force.
O'Casey presents the audience at the same time, or in rapid succession, with different views. Thus each becomes a critique of the other, or a view advanced as a sacred truth is shown as erroneous. In Act Two we see the juxtaposition of Pearse's speech and the alternative reality of the pub with its speech, characters and outlook. O'Casey does not tell us Pearse is speaking folly but invites us to think so.
In the play O'Casey is at pains to show that the suppression of the rising is not an unfortunate accident of history. While many men take up arms, O'Casey argues that the defeat at the hands of the British was inevitable. The myths of the past and fervent response to the leaders' rhetoric have made men feel ready to give their lives. When they have second thoughts, they are afraid to voice them and turn back - till events overtake them, and the instinct for self-preservation becomes strong - as it does for Brennan when he sees Clitheroe die.
The revolutionaries we see are not presented sympathetically. There is a cold fanaticism and an unwholesome rejection of the pleasure of sexual love for what Rosie calls higher things than a girl's garthers. Fluther's pursuit of the whore is shown as a more humane and wise course than Clitheroe's renunciation of his wife. It is true that Nora's attempts to win back Jack are selfish, but his outlook is nonetheless a delusion.
Maureen Hawkins of the University of Lethbridge, offers a slightly different perspective:
I'm not sure you have the political criticism in the play quite right. It does critique the Rising but not merely on the grounds that it was doomed to defeat. The point for O'Casey is that it was the wrong war for the tenement dwellers (and for that matter, for Corporal Stoddart). Divisive issues of nationalism and religion set them against one another when they should be uniting in the class war. The Covey is a pompous idiot who lacks the true "Communist" spirit (which both Fluther and Bessie have), but, unpleasant as he is, his ideological perceptions are quite accurate: The Plough and the Stars doesn't belong in a purely nationalist battle that will simply change the workers'masters.
My authority for this is not only my own reading but also numerous critics including John Jordan and Ron Ayling (O'Casey's close friend and literary executor) as well as Eileen O'Casey.
It is worth thinking about what this means for modern theatre productions. O�Casey perhaps writes mainly for a contemporary, mainly Irish (or at least British) audience, that may be familiar with the political situation. Today, the history may be less important as a record of the past, than as embodying timeless and persistent themes. In fact, if the play is only about what happened in Dublin early in the last century, then its value as literature and serious drama may be less.
The director of a play can use techniques of production to move the attention of the audience towards or away from the topical (and now dated) historical account. We see this at work in modern productions of Shakespeare�s history plays. The audience today may not know any other version of the history of Richard II or Henry V � but we see the plays principally as explorations of the nature of kingship and power, of the private individual and his public duty. And we can enjoy Brecht's Mutter Courage without knowing anything much about the Thirty Years War (a safe bet with a British audience). Does O�Casey also explore any themes that go beyond the immediate story that embodies them? Should the director try to show this, and, if so, how?
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