Word: abbeys
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...retired from the service of the British government in 1949 as headmaster of Barking Abbey School in London, and came out to Africa to teach English. (Headmasters don't have much time for teaching...
Tragic, comic and sentimental as only Irish plays can be, The Plough and the Stars is one of the plays that has made Ireland's Abbey Theatre world-renowned (not only as a center of culture, but as the focus of controversy). The Plough and the Stars was chosen for the Abbey's bicentennial tour in New York and Boston because it was definitive in developing the "Abbey style" of Irish realism: perfect brogues, meticulous blocking, sublime melodrama...
...play is a subltly modulated blend of humor (verging on slapstick) with tragedy (verging on bathos). The Abbey's great achievement in the past has been its ability to stage O'Casey without falling into either abyss. While the production now at the Schubert does not fall from the tightrope acting the play demands, neither does it evoke gasps...
Though two of the Abbey's finest actors, Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna, returned for this production, the acting somehow seems stagey and lackluster. Surface characterization is emphasized at the expense of deeper emotional involvement. Siobhan McKenna plays Bessie Burgess with grandeur but drops the ends of her lines; Scorcha Cusack staggers a bit too much as Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips...
...Abbey players cannot act O'Casey badly; his style is second nature to them. But this production lacks freshness. Though they go through all the preparatory motions there comes no climax, no emotional catharsis. This Plough and Stars processes slowly and without stirring our hearts. Like a tired warhouse decked in its old trappings, this production holds itself proudly, but does not prance...