(Peter Crawley’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 7/29.)
The people are divided, the city will soon be torn apart by the 1916 Easter Rising and the nation created in its wake will forever rest on unstable foundations. Famously, the passionate scepticism of Sean O’Casey’s classic caused an outcry – and a riot – in 1926, when a burgeoning national narrative tolerated little dissent or confusion in relation to the cause. The question posed by Wayne Jordan’s fluent, confident and sparing new production for the Abbey is thus doubled: what sort of play have we inherited, and what sort of nation?
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