The Plough and the Stars by Sean O'Casey
Prior to the First World War, social democracy, socialism, and communism had been used almost interchangeably by adherents and detractors alike. The political currency of these terms found itself limited by the cataclysm in Europe, an event which brought conflicting views on the national question that had been simmer within the working class movement to a boiling point. The collapse of the Second International would be the catalyst for the moderate parties in the West to forswear any earlier kinship with anti-war militants to demonstrate their patriotism. This decision likewise prompted allegations of treachery and fascism from the Communists with Lenin at their helm. Lifelong Leninist Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars dramatizes this bitter schism at the commanding heights of these political parties through their lowliest constituents in how the inability of these parties to wean themselves from the political volition of the bourgeoisie left the working poor as pawns, lacking scarcely more agency than the characters on stage themselves. The working class in the play are doomed to follow and tail the bourgeois national struggles, unable to fully break from them and recognize their shared kinship with their fellow poor. The play therefore cannot be understood in its fullness as simply a pacifist broadside against physical force Irish nationalism but rather as a multifaceted meditation on political contradictions within the working class. O’Casey’s Ireland had only just emerged from many bitter years of war as Europe was descending into a state of deep unrest. The pro-treaty side had emerged victorious, placing the Cumann na nGaedheal in power over the “Free State” unchallenged as Sinn Fein still clung to its policy of abstentionism. Frustration and pessimism prevailed over the future of Ireland and its working class, all of which are represented in O’Casey’s character driven tragedy. Yet in the cast, O’Casey represented an antediluvian proletariat, in their political innocence before the 20th century’s great revolutionary storms.
Between their declaration that ‘the workers have no fatherland’ and their support for the Irish and Polish independence struggle, Marx and Engels’ stance on the national question had left much unresolved during their lifetime. It was left up to their successors to make sense of the position of the working class and socialist movements in relation to the anti-colonial struggle. In The Plough and The Stars, as in Ireland, this junction was dominated by the towering figure of James Connolly. Connolly put into practice, (or attempted to put into practice) Lenin’s theory of revolutionary defeatism from the standpoint of the struggle for Irish independence. Like many smaller nations within the colonial empires, the war served as a chance to use the colonial master’s “difficulty” as their “opportunity”. As the leader of the Irish Citizen Army, Connolly, a onetime soldier in the British Army, had opposed the First World War. After it became a grim certainty he prepared to foment an uprising against the British empire. His death, in the wake of the Easter rising, gave Ireland a martyr as it deprived them of a great leader. O’Casey was part of a marginalized but devoted section of the Irish left who doggedly maintained the continuity of James Connolly as an Irish Bolshevik.
Prior to O'Casey, the acute suffering of the urban poor had been all but invisible in Irish drama. Boucicault had made the struggle for Irish independence the backdrop for his sensational extravaganza The Shaugraun. yet within this setting he treated the various classes of Ireland as stock characters who interacted with each other without contention in light of the wider movement which swept them across the world. Nor did the showman even deign to pick the side of British or Irish with regard to the national question, with the British Captain happily marrying a Fenian’s sister. Wilde, an eclectic, contrarian socialist, playfully satirized the British aristocracy’s manners of genteel equivocation in The Importance of Being Earnest, to which the governess Miss Prism was merely a somewhat hackneyed foil. During the Gaelic revival, the nationalist convulsions played out vividly upon peasant hearths in Yeat's Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Yet they did with no less ardour in the courts of ancient lords in Lady Gregory's Grania. Irish intellectuals, like their continental counterparts, had great success in appealing to their provincial countrymen to join them in the struggle. Everywhere the peasantry made up the bulwark of the independence movement as a perennial revolutionary subject. This expedient idealization of the Irish peasantry was unchallenged until the scandalous Playboy of the Western World. It was a reversal which would spark a riot, as Plough would almost two decades later. O’Casey’s masterpiece did not do this by depicting peasant girls of dubious virtue, as Synge had, but for a grand exposition of the vagaries of nationalism, which the play explicitly and deliberately linked to all forms of suffering among the toiling masses. The cross section of the teeming tenement gives the audience the spectrum of opinion within the working class movement alone and shows them suffering alike, without distinction for their feelings about the nation.
In its depiction of the quarrels between the nationalists and the regular townspeople the play kicks up considerable ambiguity as to whether O’Casey is simply questioning nationalism or rather the vicissitudes of the mainstream socialist movement, thus elevating the play from a simple critique of nationalism to a lament of the various socialist parties’ inconsistent reception of nationalism. The cast of characters is strikingly homogeneous in their class composition, and the topics of conversation, likewise, show the groundswell of class consciousness in the midst of the First World War. This conflict and the social forces it unleashed would engulf the whole of Northern Europe and unseat four dynasties, troubling all crowned heads. By the time Plough was first performed, the first by Tiefling government had been elected in Britain and the Bolsheviks had won against all odds in Russia. The two largest empires in the world at the time now had reformers and revolutionaries in command. The working class movement had finally come to grasp power, both electoral and insurrectionary, but in the process it had split itself into two factions over the question of war and the colonial question. Lenin, the figure most emblematic of this divide, characterized the First World War, the scene for the Easter Rising and Plough thus: “a struggle between Britain, France and Germany for the partition of colonies and for the plunder of rival countries”. Likewise, the great powers, including their respective socialist parties such as the British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, each viewed it as a struggle between civilization and barbarism, between absolutism and democracy. Ultimately, neither won. The war between empires had descended into a war between classes that raged within the defeated central powers and beyond. Plough’s Sergeant Tinley, and Bessie Burgess, though lowly soldiers and peddlers are nonetheless well represented in the major parties of the time, a reflection of their popularity. Characters such as these represent the constituents of those parties within the Second International who came out in support of the war, wither by duty of “defence of the fatherland” or a support of its institutions. Bessie, who sings: “I can’t for th’ life o’ me undherstand how they can call themselves Catholic, when they won’t lift a finger to help poor little Catholic Belgium.” echoing the endless propaganda surrounding real and imagined German army atrocities against the Belgian people at the beginning of the war. Singing “Rule Britannia” as the British come, does not save her, as she was reminded of her Irishness. Her remembrance of the Tommies and her own son “dhrenched in water an’ soaked in blood” parrots the speech taking place outside. The sacrifice justifies itself on the basis of previous sacrifices, a never ending, mutually reinforcing cycle.
On the other side the figure of Connolly looming over the play as the paragon of the nationalist and socialist movements at the head of the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly and the tension within his ideal drive the play forward. As with the gods in Greek tragedy, neither he nor The Voice of The Man (obviously Pearse) are depicted. They are not gods, but men and their will, supposed to be carried out through the chorus, is not carried out by the raucous and bellicose patrons of the tavern in their drunken dithyrambs. The play’s poorly received 1936 adaption to the screen, reverses this ancient taboo to a disconcerting result. The figure of “Comrade Commander” Connolly, his flamboyant speech, along with and the jarring image of the rally which paralleled the spectacle of the rallies of fascist parties which had by this time overtaken the lion’s share of Europe. Moroni Olsen’s performance as Connolly even bears a striking resemblance to the leader of the British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. His motions uncomfortably follow Hitler’s well rehearsed gesticulation no less. The film was disowned but its own director, the illustrious John Ford, for neutering the play’s original politics, but this development only further troubles the conventional understanding of politics (in both Hollywood and the Abbey). One would expect them to omit many references to socialism and communism found in the original, but these largely remain. What the film ultimately lacks, is the phonetic, exaggerated dialect of all characters, which borders on stage Irish. This element of absurdity is an element which adds the requisite morbidity to the suffering and death within the play, which in Ford’s film, is simply comic relief. In much the same way does the grey of the film turn the flamboyant costumes into anachronistic modified business suits, a reminder of its immediacy at the time.
The character of Rosie Redmond, though a short part, is notable for throwing an especially trenchant barb at the respectable, constitutional Nationalism of the time by way of psychoanalytic détournement. Rosie, the soiled dove, is a reversal of the Yeats’ cloying Revival era image of Ireland as Kathleen Ni Houlihan and the “Rose at the Rood of Time”. It is certainly no coincidence that her last name is that of Irish Parliamentary Party chief John Redmond, O’Casey’s enemy, who was well known and reviled for his support of the British war effort and who, like Yeats’ Kathleen, enticed young men to die. In direct opposition to the men of ‘16, Redmond, an Irish Nationalist, encouraged his supporters to fight for Britain in order to win their freedom. His National Volunteers army broke off from the Irish Volunteers a few years before the events of the play, taking with him the bulk of the membership. Were it not for Redmond, the long awaited Rising might even well have succeeded. Indeed, “prostitute” in this political sense was among Lenin’s favourite epithets for his foes. Redmond’s namesake is there to tempt the young men away from not only the struggle for Irish freedom, but in the case of the Covey, all freedom. Lieutenant Langon and Clitheroe’s claims that Ireland is greater than a wife or mother is indeed true; as for men, women in Rosie’s position are indeed greater to them than their own wives or mother. Though not so spiteful as Joyce’s porcine caricature of his homeland, O’Casey’s Rosie, like his Irish Free State, belongs to whoever can buy her, oblivious to the dying.
Those who bought Ireland were, specifically the audience at the Abbey where the play first premiered; Ireland’s ruling elite, who were foremost among Dublin’s theatregoing public. To them, the play’s endless squalor and gaudiness of its costumes were also a stiff reproach. It was, however, not these insinuations about the profession of a character such as Rosie Redmond in the tavern which sparked the riots, but rather, like the Playboy Riots; pieces of cloth. The sight of a colour guard with the Tricolour and Starry Plough drinking at the counter of a public house which caused the uproar, instigated by the women of Cumann na mBan. According to Cumann na mBan member Sighle Humphreys, who like many present was a niece and brother to the martyrs and fighters of the Rising, it was the women of Ireland who were rioters and not the basis for the riot, the women who defended the honour of their men, and not the other way around. The Covey, who most closely mirrors Casey’s own politics, at least in words, embodies his own frustration at his inability to sway his friends and neighbours with his half-baked, undeveloped theory which had not yet been tempered in revolutionary fire. His reservations about the Rising, must have been vindicated at the time, a cold comfort in the face of the loss of so many close friends and former comrades. The Covey’s challenge to the revolutionaries: “what’s the use of freedom if it’s not economic freedom?”, intones a common view around the national question, namely, that it was simply the province of the bourgeoisie entirely. As he maintains, the eponymous Starry Plough is “a Labour flag... never meant for politics”. This aloofness was in contrast to the view of Lenin and others, who as ardent advocates for the political (as opposed to merely economic) struggle maintained that, in the age of imperialism, national freedom was an absolute prerequisite for economic freedom. Casey is extending to the Easter Rising the same outlook which the anti-war socialists of the Zimmerwald Left saw the First World War. In contrast, Lenin and the Third International’s opposition to the conflict was grounded in anti-imperialism instead of simple pacificism. Their task was not to wait but to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”. Those Communists within the imperialist nations pursued revolutionary defeatism during the war and by extension opposed colonialism in Britain and Russia. The task set out by the new international set out very different tasks for the socialists of the colonies vis-à-vis those of the colonizer nations.
The Covey, like many of his political confession, would not see it thus. His unsolicited advice to the patrons of the tavern evokes a particular approach to the national question which rejected it as a form of class collaboration. The Leninist current which upheld Connolly as a model, praising his Irish Citizen’s Army as the first Red Army in Europe, stressed the importance of participating in anti-colonial revolutions alongside the national bourgeoisie in order to weaken the imperialists. The Covey’s declaration that “there’s no such thing as an Irishman, or an Englishman, or a German, or a Turk; we’re all only human bein’s.”, that Scientifically speakin’, it’s all a question of the accidental gatherin’ together of mollycewels an’ atoms” is his own way of dissociating from the disaster which is unfolding in plain view . Covey’s view might initially make sense, but taken to its conclusion, would therefore mean no difference between oppressed proletariat and the bourgeois oppressor. As Engels, in a quote Lenin was quite fond of, states: “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends”. The Covey’s gloss would be a flattening of the contradiction between the colonizer/colonized, and the exploited/exploited. His act of ignoring or denying an inexorable reality bar him from the historical stage. The difference between molecules and atoms itself produces the reality in which we find ourselves. This material reality, is, however, not simply reducible to the sum of its parts. The characters in Plough are themselves part of a wider drama, a theme which carries throughout the whole play. The primordial element of tragedy, inevitability, remains in spite of all mankind’s scientific advances. It is not in the will of the gods, but the laws of Physics. The Covey’s scripture, Jenersky’s Thesis on the Origin, Development, and Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat, a pastiche of Lunacharsky and others roundly criticized by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which reflected the shortcomings of the Second International to come to full epistemological terms with the break between bourgeois and proletarian philosophy and how it applied to the realities of political power.
After the imperialist war, the question of conflict as a facet of everyday life negated the possibility of neutrality, never again could the cross section of opinion gather in the same slum without coming to blows. Ideas, now grasped by the masses, had a physical force. The island’s politics were dominated by the sides formed in the aftermath of the War and the Rising. The materialism of a time before the quantitative accumulation of capital had necessitated the qualitative change of the world war, the crisis of imperialism. This conflagration lead many to accept Covey’s premise that matter at a molecular level to the conclusion that live was meaningless and absurd, evinced in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. At a molecular level, there might be no difference between the dead who filled the trenches and the living. The promise of a new world ultimately overcame this, as O’Casey was convinced of the worthiness of living. The triumph of the Bolsheviks had turned Marx into a prophet and Marxism into prophecy. The nationalism which had once enchanted O’Casey had given way to a view towards the class struggle as a new political arena dawned and no longer would nationalist ideology be bent to serve the interests of the toiling masses. While O’Casey’s final indictment is that at the historic juncture the promise of independence had failed the poor, his own convictions are as nebulous as those of the characters themselves, a faithful composite of their suffering which produces his faith in a new world to which humanity could ascend. The trauma of the First World War had shaken the faith many had in their country. Unlike his former comrades in the Citizen Army, Sean O’Casey saw the limits of the national idea, but like them, he saw the chance to build something new from the ashes of the old empires as his hero, Lenin, had.