Film Screening: The Plough and the Stars (1937)

The W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre

Written by Sean O’Casey
Directed by John Ford

Starring Barbara Stanwick, Preston Foster, Barry Fitzgerald, and members of the original Abbey Theatre cast of The Plough and the Stars

Just ten years after The Abbey Theatre’s premiere of The Plough and the Stars incited riots in Dublin, renowned Hollywood director John Ford adapted the play for a much anticipated film. He planned to cast it with the actors from the original stage production, but his studio (RKO) insisted that he hire known American actors for the leads. He was ultimately able to hire five actors from the original production including Barry Fitzgerald, who would go on to have a long career in film. During editing, O’Casey’s political opinions caused problems once again as RKO objected to the overt politics in the film and interjected, reshooting several scenes against Ford’s wishes with another Director.

The Plough and the Stars Plot Description:
Pretty young newlywed Nora Clitheroe is the talk of her tenement as she tirelessly works to lift her family out of their impoverished circumstances. She tries to keep her husband Jack from the revolutionary fervor sweeping through Dublin. But Jack becomes a Commandant in the Irish Citizen Army, and when the Easter Rising of 1916 begins, he leaves a pregnant Nora to help lead the fight. The disparate, quarrelsome tenement residents are forced to shelter together as urban warfare makes their home nearly as treacherous as the streets. Passions and ideals rise and converge, but in the end, loss and devastation triumph over the promise of a new Ireland.

Don’t miss our live production of The Plough and the Stars beginning on Saturday, April 20 on the Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage. Learn more.

Tickets to this screening are available now for $15 ($10 for Irish Rep Members & O’Casey Cycle Subscribers).

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Sean O’Casey is an Irish dramatist renowned for his innovative playwriting style, which balances deeply comic and tragic elements in an atmosphere of stark realism, with emphasis on characterization of working and lower class Dubliners.

O’Casey was born John Casey on March 30, 1880 in Dublin, Ireland, the thirteenth child (fifth surviving) to a lower-middle class Protestant family. When his father died in 1886, the family’s financial circumstances grew worse. As an infant, O’Casey contracted trachoma, which led to impaired and deteriorating eyesight for his entire life. Unable to participate regularly in formal schooling due to his health, he began working in manual labor positions at age fourteen, continuing self-education throughout his adolescence.

When he was in his 20s, O’Casey became interested in Irish history and culture, as well as labor causes. He joined the Gaelic League in 1906 and began learning Irish, changing his name to Sean O’Cathasaigh. He also began writing, primarily poetry. He then joined the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and its offshoot, the Irish Citizen Army, participating in the Dublin lock-out strike in 1913. In 1914, he resigned from these organizations as he focused on socialism as a means towards improvement rather than nationalism; he did not participate in the Easter Rising of 1916.

O’Casey began to write plays in 1916. His first four submissions to The Abbey Theatre were rejected, but O’Casey persisted, and in 1923, The Abbey produced The Shadow of a Gunman, beginning O’Casey’s career as a playwright at age 43. By this time he had adopted the final variation of his name, Sean O’Casey. Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) completed O’Casey’s famed Dublin Trilogy and established his career as a full-time writer.

In 1926, he met Eileen Carey, an actress in the West End production of The Plough and the Stars, and they married in 1927. Together they had three children, Breon, Niall, and Shivaun. In 1929, they moved permanently to England. O’Casey’s relationship with The Abbey Theatre soured after they refused to stage his play The Silver Tassie, but he continued to write and produce play with other theatres, including Within the Gates (1934), The Star Turns Red (1940), and Purple Dust (1943), and several of his plays were staged in the United States and adapted into films during his lifetime. O’Casey died of a heart attack on September 18, 1964, at the age of 84.

Irish Rep is proud to celebrate the work and life of Sean O’Casey as part of our 30th Anniversary Season.

Film Screening:
The Plough and the Stars (1937)

Discover Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)

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