MARY CONWAY revels in a powerful reminder that human lives are not defined by physical perfection
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Not quite what Sean O’Casey had in mind
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The Plough and The Stars
National Theatre
3/5
Sean O’Casey’s infamous play on the consequences of the Easter Rising for the inhabitants of a Dublin tenement house translates uneasily to the wide stage of the National’s Lyttleton Theatre. The play itself holds such a canonical position in the cultural history of Irish socialism that my expectations were always going to be ambitiously high. Yet the irreverence with which O’Casey treated the populist nationalism of Padraig Pearse, and which inspired rioting at the Abbey Theatre when the play opened, is replaced with an earnestness in this production, ill-fitted to the playwright’s scepticism.
This sincerity does not preclude moments of great physical comedy and clowning from the cast’s performance however.
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