(Clare Brennan’s article appeared in The Observer, 7/30; Photo: ‘Ophelia-like’ Sophie Lenglinger as Nora, with Liam Heslin as Jack, in The Plough and the Stars. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh.) 

Town Hall theatre, Galway
O’Casey’s three plays of working-class Dublin life encompass conflict, grief and the human spirit in Garry Hynes’s fine production

 A highlight of this year’s Galway international arts festival (GIAF), DruidO’Casey is a new play cycle by Druid theatre company of the “Dublin trilogy” by one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights, Seán O’Casey (1880-1964). The three plays are presented back to back, in chronological sequence, over one day. The experience is revelatory. O’Casey grew up in working-class Dublin, and his portrayal, here, of life in the city’s tenements during the years of conflict between 1915 and 1922 becomes an expression of the wider world, its yesterdays, todays and tomorrows.

This fine production by Druid’s co-founder and longstanding artistic director, Garry Hynes, probes the ambiguities and indeterminacies of O’Casey’s texts, ultimately requiring us to take seriously a laughter-raising line: “There’s no such thing as an Irishman, an Englishman, or a German or a Turk; we’re all only human bein’s.”

Actors, revelling in the richness of O’Casey’s Dublin demotic, bring his impoverished characters to rumbustious life. Francis O’Connor’s design roots their tenement homes in reality with smoking ranges and solid props, but backs them with walls that have the sheen of pale-green marble, rising in slabs – like a memorial pressing on to the living.

As The Plough and the Stars (1926) opens in 1915. Fluther (comically brilliant Aaron Monaghan) is fixing a lock on to a door for a young wife, Nora, who wants to keep the world beyond at bay (an inverted echo of Ibsen’s bourgeois Nora, slamming the door as she leaves her “doll’s house”). She cannot: a door is always both entrance and exit.

In a pub, Nora’s neighbours are drinking and wrangling. Beyond the window, a speaker addresses a rally: “Without shedding of blood, there is no redemption!” Hynes’s direction highlights O’Casey’s ironic juxtaposition. Pausing their shenanigans, light streaming on to their upturned faces, drinkers are disciples looking for guidance, sinners longing to be saints (lighting, James F Ingalls).

Nora’s husband, Jack (swithering, Liam Heslin), follows the “Starry Plough” flag to 1916’s Easter Rising and his death. Nora flees her home, miscarries her baby and loses her mind (Sophie Lenglinger, Ophelia-like). Bessie, the aggressive, swaggering, Rule, Britannia-singing neighbour against whom Nora wanted to lock her door, becomes the play’s improbable martyr (Hilda Fay, soul wrenching), shot trying to protect Nora. Soldiers in the street mistook her silhouette in a window for that of a sniper.

This indeterminacy of appearances is at the heart of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923). It is May, 1920, the Irish war of independence is being waged. In a room in a tenement sits Donal, fashioning a poem. His roommate, Seumas, is getting up (blustering Rory Nolan). Maguire (Heslin) breezes in and out, leaving a bag behind. A stream of neighbours follows, in awe of Donal. All imagine he is on the run, including “lovely little Minnie”.

“Minnie is attracted to the idea, and I am attracted to Minnie,” smiles Donal to himself (self-indulgently self-centred; Marty Rea). “And what danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?”

When danger appears, Donal and Seumas cower, quivering on a bed, Laurel and Hardy-comical. They leave the fearful Minnie (butterfly-like Caitríona Ennis) courageously to assume the role Donal no longer wishes to pretend to.

Closing the day, Juno and the Paycock (1924) at first seems disappointing. We have come to expect hilarity and theatricality, balancing outrageously against tragedy. Initially, the presentation of the Boyle family feels flat by comparison, staid and standard naturalism. In fact, it turns out to be the magnificent culmination of what has gone before.

It is 1922. The Irish civil war is under way. Juno struggles to feed her family: workshy husband, a “captain” who has never been to sea; maimed son Johnny (Tommy Harris, haunted), former Irregular turned informer, waiting fearfully for retribution (although the family does not know this); and daughter Mary (Zara Devlin, from pert to crushed), on strike because “a principle’s a principle”. News of a legacy brings hope, credit, material goods. It’s a mistake. There is no inheritance.

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(Marion Chaval’s, Magali Faure’s, and Eve Jackson’s article appeared on France24, 7/26.)

Just over 100 years ago, painters, sculptors, writers and musicians battled for gold, silver and bronze at the Olympics in the French capital. To mark a year until the Paris Games, we’re looking at the artistic side of the world’s biggest sporting event. FRANCE 24 brings you an exclusive interview with highly acclaimed theatre director Thomas Jolly, who’s directing the opening and closing ceremonies. Also on the programme: the new Olympic sport of breakdancing and the Michelin-starred chefs cooking for the athletes.

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(Mark Lawson’s article appeared in the Guardian, 7/20; Photo: Gripping … Sarah Slimani in Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors at Dorfman theatre, London. Photograph: Myah Jeffers.)

Dorfman theatre, London
Piling up devastating detail, this play with a remarkable cast shockingly lays bare the abject failures behind this disaster

During dramas about a national catastrophe – in films such as Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough (1996) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) – viewers have the sickening sense of watching real people doomed to die horribly. A variant comes in the National Theatre’s exploration of the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in west London that took 72 lives and devastated hundreds more. The subtitle reveals that the nine residents depicted all got out.

It begins with the lights up as the cast, out of character, explain that if the content overwhelms us, we can leave and return. No images or sounds of fire will be used and the residents dramatised have consented to the words used having been taken from interviews with novelist and writer Gillian Slovo.

This culturally kind prologue made me fear that the show might not be cruel enough to the architects of this disaster of politics and construction. But Slovo – with directors Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike – piles up devastating detail from the verbatim survivor accounts, public inquiry transcripts and TV interviews.

The central charge is that the conflagration at Grenfell Tower started with sparks from a promised bonfire of regulation and red-tape by David Cameron. Tory ministers failed to heed a coroner’s warning after an earlier block blaze killed six. Cladding materials that failed safety tests (one flare-up almost torching the laboratory) were banned elsewhere but allowed in the light-touch UK.

It is convincingly suggested that local authority housing policy resulted in a sort of social cleansing with tenants – often diverse or disadvantaged – isolated and ignored in a corner of a super-rich postcode. Residents who raised concerns were told in terms to be grateful for having a potential inferno over their heads. Such prejudice led to a police riot squad being dispatched to Grenfell, in case local people kicked-off about the dangers.

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(Dalya Alberge’s article appeared in the Guardian, 7/23; Photo: Gertrude Robins, pictured in 1911: she depicted women’s often limited choices between second-rate marriages and independence. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London.)

Powerful dramas that speak to today’s audiences, retrieved after British Library discovery, will be performed in London next month

It was a chance discovery in the British Library that has led to a change in fortune for Gertrude Robins – though she has had to wait more than 100 years after her death to achieve it.

In the early 20th century, Robins was among the female playwrights seen as up-and-coming rivals to George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and JM Barrie, but over time her work was gradually forgotten.

Now two of her one-act socially conscious plays – Makeshifts and Realities – are being revived. Andrew Maunder, a scholar of early 20th century theatre, stumbled across them in the library after researching plays of the period and was struck by their quality.

He told the Observer these works were not “historical curiosities” but plays that spoke to modern audiences through lead characters who faced dilemmas over double standards and the expectations placed on women.

He described them as “so well crafted” that they did not need to be updated or edited for the performances that he is producing at the Finborough theatre in London from next month.

Robins, who was also an actor and one of the first female pilots, wrote at least 14 plays before her life was cut short by tuberculosis. Her death in 1917, aged just 37, sparked speculation over what might have been had she lived to write more plays.

A host of female playwrights have been overlooked in favour of male dramatists but, in their own day, they were as celebrated

Andrew Maunder

In 1908, Makeshifts premiered to great acclaim at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, whose then artistic director, Annie Horniman, described it as “one of the best one-act plays … performed at my theatre”.

Noting that, by 1908, votes for women was among the significant issues of the day, Maunder said that the plays touched on suffragist ideas and that Horniman encouraged plays written by women or about them, arguing that they “have not yet risen to their proper position”.

Set in a London suburb, Makeshifts is about thirtysomething sisters Caroline and Dolly, with uncertain futures unless they can find husbands. They must choose between settling for second-best men and independence. Dolly, who is “inclined to brusquerie and superficial sharpness”, tells her sister: “Men fight shy of girls like me. They think we’re too clever.”

An immediate hit, Makeshifts led to thousands of performances across the world, from Australia to South Africa. In 1913, one reviewer wrote: “It is a perfect little work of art worthy to [rank] with JM Barrie’s The Twelve-Pound Look.” Others described it as “brilliantly written” and said of her characters: “Her people are real people, which means that they talk and do real things.”

In the sequel, Realities, which premiered in Manchester in 1911, Caroline has married one of those disappointing men and finds herself tempted by a former suitor who wants her as his mistress.

Maunder is head of the department of humanities at the University of Hertfordshire and editor of the series British Literature of World War I.

He believes that the two plays were last performed at the end of the first world war: “I haven’t found any record apart from that – although possibly by amateur groups, because they’re very actable.”

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