The Thing They Were Angry About

On the night of February 11, 1926, the Abbey Theatre audience rioted.

The Plough and the Stars — Sean O’Casey’s play about the 1916 Easter Rising as experienced from inside a Dublin tenement — had been running for four nights. By the fourth night, people were rushing the stage. Fights broke out in the pit. Women in the gallery threw things at the actors. The noise made it impossible to hear the dialogue.

W.B. Yeats appeared before the curtain and addressed the crowd. “You have disgraced yourselves again,” he told them — the “again” a pointed reference to the 1907 riots over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. He said the audience was proving, once more, that Ireland had produced writers it was unworthy of. The shouting continued. The police were eventually called.

One hundred years later, the play is still in repertory. People are still being moved to tears.

It’s worth being precise about what the 1926 audience was angry about, because it wasn’t arbitrary.

The Rising had happened ten years earlier. The War of Independence had ended five years earlier. The Civil War — which split the country and killed more people than the Rising — had ended three years earlier. The people in that theater had lost friends, brothers, neighbors. The grief was fresh. They’d come expecting a memorial.

What O’Casey gave them instead: a tenement full of people who were frightened, flawed, bickering, sometimes petty, sometimes magnificent in small ways. The Irish tricolor carried into a pub. Rosie Redmond, a prostitute, with a substantial and sympathetic role. The men debating politics and drinking while their city burns. Nora Clitheroe, the play’s emotional center, begging her husband not to go — not out of political opposition but because she loves him and is terrified. The hero leaving anyway. Nora eventually losing her mind.

And then Bessie Burgess — a unionist, a woman who’d spent the whole play as a figure of conflict and mockery — dying while shielding Nora from a sniper’s bullet, still singing a hymn, furious and bewildered at the injustice of dying this way.

The audience’s complaint was coherent: this was not a play that honored the sacrifice. It showed the Rising as something happening around ordinary people — interrupting them, frightening them, killing them without the consolation of ideology. The heroes are absent or dead. The survivors are broken.

What they wanted was a play that said: it was worth it. What they got was a play that refused to say that, not because O’Casey disagreed, but because he was trying to say something harder and more specific — something about what it actually felt like, from inside a tenement, to be alive in Dublin in 1916.

Here is the paradox: the thing they were angry about is exactly why the play survived.

Idealized art is specific to its political moment. It tells you: this sacrifice had this meaning, this struggle had this value. To receive that message emotionally, you have to share — or at least be sympathetic to — the underlying investment. A play that says the Rising was noble requires you to care about Irish independence in a particular way. Forty years later, the politics have shifted. Sixty years later, the specifics have blurred. A hundred years later, you’re receiving a historical document, not an experience.

What O’Casey wrote was different. Nora’s fear doesn’t require political investment — it requires having been afraid for someone you love. Bessie’s death doesn’t require knowing about unionism and nationalism — it requires knowing something about how dying and injustice work. The tenement men arguing instead of acting don’t require understanding the Irish Citizen Army — they require recognizing something about how human beings behave under pressure.

The human, particular, unheroic things are the things that don’t go stale. The grief, the fear, the gap between what people believe and what they do when it actually comes to it, the small courage and the large failure — these are not products of their political moment. They’re just what people are like.

The rioters wanted the play to make the sacrifice legible to the future. Ironically, it did exactly that — just not in the way they meant. Not by explaining or justifying, but by showing it from inside the experience of people who were living through it.

This is not a unique case. It appears to be almost a law of literary survival.

The works that faced the most intense resistance for being insufficiently grand tend to be the ones we return to. The Playboy of the Western World was attacked for celebrating a murderer and insulting Irish womanhood. Ulysses was prosecuted for obscenity and nearly suppressed entirely. Madame Bovary was tried for immorality. Leaves of Grass was called disgusting.

In each case, the objection was to the human scale of the thing — too real, too interior, too willing to show ordinary life with its compromises and desires intact. And in each case, that’s the quality that kept the work alive.

The grandeur-seekers aren’t wrong that grandeur matters. They’re wrong about where it lives. It doesn’t live in the elevated. It lives in the precise.

The Plough and the Stars celebrates its centenary this year. A hundred years since the riots, since Yeats stood before the curtain and told the audience it had disgraced itself. The play is still being performed. People are still in the dark, still feeling Bessie Burgess die, still watching Nora come apart.

They were angry about all of this. Every bit of it.

That’s why it’s still here.