The Plough and the Stars comes early in my list of favourite plays because it was the first play I ever saw. I was sixteen and my mother and I went to the Queens Theatre, the then home of the Abbey, on a couple of complimentary tickets. I was sixteen, it was my first play, but it was also the first play my mother had ever seen, playgoing was not common among working class Dubliners.
To see O’Casey’s working class Dubliners on stage was a culture shock. Like most people I had been reared on American films. To hear O’Casey’s alliterative, caustic words bouncing around the stage, to see his men and women, Fluther, Covey, Jack, Nora, Bessie, Jinny, opened my eyes like no play has done since. Ten years later I was playing Jack in the Abbey, with most of the people I had seen ten years earlier, indeed many of them had been in the first production in 1926, which caused a riot.
It’s a play I love deeply, because it shows how the lives of ordinary people are affected by historic events. O’Casey captures the suffering, the heartbreaks, the nobility, the humour of the common man.
When the British soldier says to Fluther about the rebels, “Why don’t they come out in the open and fight fair?” and Fluther replies “A couple of hundred scrawls of chaps with shotguns and rosaries, against a hundred thousand trained men with Horse, Foot and Artillery, and he wants us to fight fair. Do you want us to come out in our skins and throw stones”, well, it makes you want to cheer, or cry, not because he is Irish, but because he is the underdog, hitting back at his hated tormentor.

Clive Geraghty