The Plough and the Stars: Reviewed by Brenda Liddy ©2012

Wayne Jordan: Director

I saw Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in The Grand Opera House Belfast on 22/09/12. It was interesting to walk from a busy street in 21^st century Belfast, and be suddenly transported into a 1916 Dublin tenement slum. I thought that Nora Clitheroe’s desire to rise above her station was poignantly portrayed. Her pristine, white blouse and white apron hanging matched her white tablecloth which spread ceremoniously on the table. Uncle Peter meanwhile provides a comic backdrop, trying to attach his stiff white collar. His military posturing and his amazing military costume suffers the same ignoble fate as Nora’s illusions of grandeur or as Mrs Gogan implies, her’notions of upperosity’.  They are both annihilated in the ‘call to arms’ where patriotism trumps illusions of domestic bliss or military pretentiousness. As the Figure in the Window preaches, ‘The fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead’ and the blood sacrifice has no place for idealists and dreamers. The war needs soldiers to fight the mighty British Empire, and Nora needs a husband. As in every war, these two competing aims cannot accommodate each other, and Nora, played by Kelly Campbell embodies this dilemma with style and in the end is reduced to an Ophelia-like waif, wandering round in a daze. In my book, The Drama of War in the Theatre of Anne Devlin, Marie Jones and Christina Reid, Three Irish Playwrights, I critique the way theatre in Ireland has tended to idealise or feminise the ideal of the nation. It is perfectly fine to have the mythical Kathleen Ni Houlihan urging young Irish men to become martyrs for the cause of Irish Freedom, but it is quite another to have Nora bawling at the barricades, begging her man to forsake to the  fight for freedom. Melissa Sihra stresses, ‘the social and cultural position of woman has historically been one of symbolic centrality and subjective disavowal as both colonial ideology and nationalist movements promoted feminised concepts of the nation, while subordinating women in everyday life.’

Jack, played by Barry Ward was excellent at showing the emotional upheaval of leaving Nora, and heading to almost certain death.

As the tragedy gathers momentum, the comic jousts between Uncle Peter and Young Covey reach a crescendo, with Nora acting as peace-maker. The effervescent Fluther’s comic shenanigans and his malapropisms add to the sense of caricature. Everything good or bad is described as derogatory and everything could be vice versa. These men are reduced to comic ciphers. They are not brave enough to fight for freedom and while they play lip service to Pearse’s rhetoric, they are not prepared to make the blood sacrifice. But why should they? They were so reduced my material deprivation, they use the opportunity of the mayhem to loot goods from the shops. This is not the image the Dublin nationalists wanted portrayed and a riot spearheaded by the Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington, broke out in the 1926 production.   

Young Covey who is fixated on a socialist tract, ‘Jenersky’s Thesis on the Origin, Development, and ‘Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat’ is continually at odds with the other men who are caught up in the fervour of nationalism. His socialist ideas are predicated on ‘saving his own skin’ and not getting shot. And in the bar scene he condemns the unfortunate prostitute.  As Declan Kibert comments, he ‘uses socialism to denounce nationalism, and then finds socialism inadequate anyway’. He argues that this play is clichéd, and that no workman would identify with Fluther or no tenement would identify with Mrs Gogan and that the work subscribes to a dead formula.   

In the second act, the fate of Jack is sealed and he is shot. Nora goes insane. Mollser, whose laboured breathing is a metaphor for the claustrophobia of the tenements, also dies. In the end the mean spirited Bessie Burgess, whose greatest satisfaction was taunting the neighbours with her rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’ saves Nora’s life and is killed by the British Army. 

 I would heartily commend this production of The Plough and the Stars.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane
by Martin McDonagh

Review written by Brenda Liddy
10th October 2009

The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, first performed in 1996, received a standing ovation from the audience when staged by the Lyric theatre in Belfast’s Elmwood Hall - under the direction of Richard Croxford.

The theme concerns the co-dependence between a mother, Mag Foley and her adult, unmarried daughter, Maureen, whose ambition to escape her mother’s control and have a life of her own is at odds with her mother’s determination to keep her tethered, lest she be left alone.

Set in rural Connemara, the action unfolds in their everyday domestic surroundings – a small room with a picture of John F. Kennedy on the mantelpiece and a tablecloth hanging on the range displaying the motto, “May you get to heaven half an hour before the devil knows you are dead”. A comfortable chair stands nearby. Their lifestyle is reflected by the mud on Maureen’s boots after she feeds the chickens, the boiling kettle, the steaming porridge…and radio music, a TV and the romance magazines and love story book Maureen enjoys.

The play opens to a war of words between mother and daughter that continues unrelentingly, disclosing the neediness of both. As the emotions driving the bickering heighten, we are made to realise that something has to give. A climax comes when the mother enters the room to find Maureen, in bra and slip, flirting with a neighbour, Pato Dooley. Unhesitatingly and unscrupulously, she spills the highly sensitive beans and enlightens Dooley about how she had to sign Maureen out of a psychiatric hospital in England 15 years earlier after she went to work in England.

We witness Maureen’s mental health being undermined by the psychological damage her mother unerringly inflicts while Maureen, far from taking it lying down, retaliates by attacking her mother physically. When Mag intercepts the mail and burns the love letter it has brought for Maureen, the daughter’s last hope of escape goes up in smoke. Then Maureen lifts the lethal poker.

It is hard to understand why this work has been classed as realism/comedy when nearly everything it features must surely be construed as tragic, even to the claustrophobia described by Pato :”You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard bearing a grudge for 20 years”. The theme has strains of the psychological thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Or even of Brian Friel’s , “Lovers“, which has a more engaging and believable outcome.

Both Stella McCusker as the mother and Geraldine Hughes as the daughter gave sterling performances and rose to the demands of being on stage almost throughout, the rapport between them always convincing. Stephen Darcy provided a memorable moment of drama with his soliloquy at the start of the second act and Matthew McElhinney emerged as someone to watch. Take a bow, Richard Croxford!