Word: fluther
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Where it is going, of course, is not to the hardy band of romantics that gamboled their way about the Easter Rebellion as only Sean O'Casey could imagine. Fluther Good and his friends are dead now, and with them has passed away so much that was respectable about "The Cause" in Ireland. It really doesn't matter any more which side you are on. The Catholic Provisionals of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) are just as bloodstained as the Protestants of the Ulster Defense League--so why bother to choose, when both are in the business of slaughtering...
SEAN O'CASEY'S play, The Plough and the Stars, begins with a lock on a door. In a Dublin tenement, Fluther Good has just installed the new lock on the flat occupied by Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Nora's lock is resented by her neighbors, Bessie Burgess (upstairs) and Mrs. Gogan, the charwoman who lives below. But the newlywed Mrs. Clitheroe persists in her efforts to shut out the slum around her; when the play opens, in November 1915, she has almost created an island of grace and quiet in the middle of the dirt and violence. Nora...
...cause riots when it first was staged. In O'Casey's portrayal, the Irishmen in the Citizen Army died shitting with fear; their wives went mad trying to keep them safe at home. The only heroes in The Plough and Stars are those who neither fight nor spout rhetoric: Fluther Good, the working man whose honest dignity defies the British to do their worst, though he is terrified of gunshot; Bessie Burgess, who nurses Nora through losing a baby and husband and is killed trying to get Nora away from a dangerous window; and Mrs. Gogan...
...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 occasionally into caricature. Still, Angela Newman, as Mrs. Gogan, manages to build a comprehensible and psychologically real persona, and Cyril Cusack, as Fluther Good, deftly plays on the entire keyboard of emotion, from deadpan humor to quiet bravery...
What goes wrong with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater revival is that O'Casey's people are ineluctably Irish, and this cast, with one exception, playacts at being Irish. The exception is Jack MacGowran, who is vastly impressive as Fluther Good, a cocky, reeling indomitable sparrow of a man with wistful repentance on the brain and wet wit on his tongue...