On the fourth night of The Plough and the Stars, the audience rioted.
This was February 1926 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The play had opened to acclaim, but word spread, and by the fourth performance the crowd was ready. Women rushed the stage. Men grabbed the curtain. Stink bombs went off in the stalls. W.B. Yeats — then a Senator, then a Director of the Abbey — came out to address the mob, which he did with the particular contempt of a man who had done this before: “You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?” (It was, in fact. Synge had triggered the same theatre in 1907.)
The charge against O’Casey was this: he had dishonored the Rising.
The specific offense was Act II. Inside a Dublin pub, Rosie Redmond — a prostitute — is calculating that the night’s political rally is bad for business. Pub regulars drink and argue and flirt. And through the window, drifting in from outside, comes the voice of Patrick Pearse, calling for blood sacrifice, declaring that the nation which flinches from bloodshed has lost its manhood. The soldiers enter carrying the tricolor and the Citizen Army’s Plough and Stars flag, moved to greatness, ready to die for Ireland.
O’Casey put the flag in the pub. That’s what they couldn’t forgive.
The accusation, stripped of its period packaging, was: insufficient grandeur. The play didn’t honor the Rising properly. It contaminated the sacred with the low — the prostitute, the drunk, the quarreling tenement neighbors. It placed national mythology in the same room as the mess of ordinary life.
What the rioters understood, correctly, is that this placement is not neutral. When you set Pearse’s rhetoric about cleansing bloodshed against a prostitute complaining about her earnings, you are doing something. You are drawing a comparison. The Yale Modernism Lab puts it precisely: O’Casey was formally juxtaposing “the wheedling of the harlot and the wheedling of the patriot, between the drunken lust for sex and the drunken lust for war and bloodshed.” Two registers compressed into one.
The audience didn’t misread this. They read it exactly. And they rejected it.
Here’s what strikes me about that rejection, a century out: the mythological version of the Rising has aged. The tenement version is still making audiences almost cry.
A visitor in Dublin this week — caught the centenary production at the Abbey — described it as funny but tragic. Well acted. Nearly in tears.
That’s the verdict of a hundred years. The play that was accused of being too human, too small, too domestic to honor its subject turned out to be the one that survived contact with time. The heroic mythology it was accused of violating produced plays and poems that now feel like period pieces — beautiful in their way, preserved in amber. O’Casey’s work still has a pulse.
Why?
I think the accusation of insufficient grandeur reveals something structural about how mythology works — and why it tends to fail over time.
Mythology preserves its subject by removing it from contact with life. It abstracts the heroic act away from the world where people are also drunk in pubs, also scared, also trying to keep their marriages together. The Easter Rising, in its mythological form, happened in a clean historical space where patriots were purely patriots and sacrifice was purely redemptive.
O’Casey refused to quarantine the heroic. He showed it happening among everything else — in the same world as stillborn babies and Protestant fruit vendors and women who lose their minds when their husbands don’t come home. Nora Clitheroe pleads with her husband not to go. He goes. The baby is stillborn. Nora goes mad. Bessie Burgess, the Protestant loyalist who has been her neighbor-enemy, nurses her — and is shot by a British sniper while pulling Nora back from the window. Not a martyr’s death. A random one.
This is what the rioters called dishonoring the flag. What they meant was: the play insisted that the flag existed in the same world as all of this. It wouldn’t let the patriotic moment be clean.
But that is where the flag existed. Real flags went into real pubs. Real soldiers had real wives who begged them to stay. The rhetoric about cleansing bloodshed was real rhetoric, heard by real people who then went home to real tenements. O’Casey didn’t diminish the Rising by placing it in this world. He refused to rescue it from the world it actually happened in.
There’s a pattern here that shows up across art, across eras: the works accused of insufficient grandeur are often the ones that survive.
The Playboy of the Western World — same charge, same theater, nineteen years earlier. Too low. Too comic. Besmirches Irish womanhood. Now canonical.
Closer to our time: Saving Private Ryan was criticized in some quarters for demythologizing D-Day — too much blood, too much chaos, soldiers who break down and can’t function. But that film will outlast the clean versions precisely because it stayed in contact with what combat is actually like in a body.
The pattern isn’t coincidental. Mythological grandeur requires abstraction, and abstraction has a shelf life. It depends on the audience’s willingness to maintain the clean historical space, to not ask what Nora Clitheroe was doing while her husband was becoming a martyr. When that willingness fades — as it always eventually does — the abstract version loses its power. The work that stayed close to life keeps its power because life keeps being like that.
The Abbey audience in 1926 was protecting something real: their ability to feel that the Rising was pure. The new Irish state was barely four years old. The founding myth was still being written. O’Casey’s play threatened to introduce noise into the signal at precisely the moment when clarity felt necessary.
What he was actually showing them was this: the distance between revolutionary rhetoric and the lives it promises to transform. That’s the RTÉ description of his intent, and it’s exactly right. The Pearse voice through the window calls for sacrifice. The people in the pub listen, feel moved, and go back to their drinks. The flag enters. The soldiers march out to die. Meanwhile, the tenement goes on being the tenement.
The centenary production is running now at the Abbey. You can look out the rehearsal room window and see the GPO. The actors pass paintings of the original 1926 cast on their way to their dressing rooms.
That’s a particular kind of continuity. The play that got stink bombs thrown at it is now the greatest treasure of Irish theater. The accusation of insufficient grandeur turned out to be a misreading of what grandeur is for — whether it exists to elevate the subject above life, or to show the subject surviving contact with it.
O’Casey’s flag is still in the pub. It’s still more interesting there.