Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage. Amid the tumult, WB Yeats was quick to condemn the unseemly behavior of the audience, connecting the evening’s events to the riots that greeted the 1907 premiere of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World by noting that this event would be O’Casey’s ‘apotheosis’. Yeats’s words proved prescient, as Plough has become one of the most produced plays in Ireland.

But one of the more overlooked aspects of Plough’s contribution to Irish drama is the way that gender has played into its story from the start. It was women who caused the ‘whirlwind’ that fourth evening of performances and women characters, such as the presence of sex worker Rosie Redmond. In 1991, the Abbey’s new Artistic Director, Garry Hynes, proved the play still had the potential for scandal with her stark, minimalist production. Hynes had many of her actors shave their heads, which introduced an androgynous uniformity to the visual landscape of the Dublin tenements. Since then, she has staged the play as part of the Druid Theatre Company’s DruidO’Casey, which performs all three Dublin plays (Plough, Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock – often referred to as the ‘Dublin Trilogy’, although O’Casey never used this term). This centenary year of Plough happens to fall eleven years after the Waking the Feminists (WTF) movement formed in response to the Abbey’s male-centric season planned for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Although there is much to say about The Plough and the Stars, the fact that this male-authored play has a long history of garnering strong reactions from women is both unusual and remarkable. This might strike some as surprising, and yet the reviewer from The Irish Times called O’Casey’s piece ‘a women’s play; a drama in which men must fight and women must weep.’ Perhaps. But women onstage and off chose action over weeping during the play’s initial run.

My fascination with the play began with my interest in the riots surrounding The Playboy of the Western World. Although accounts about the exact reason for the riots vary, many men voiced their outrage at the way that women from the West of Ireland were depicted. They argued that Irish women could never be more attracted to a murderer than a liar, nor would they be so easily taken in by a conman like Christy. But while Irish womanhood was a concern in Synge’s play, it was mainly Irish men who did the rioting. This was not the case with The Plough and the Stars, where nationalist activist and widow of Easter Week Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington led the protest activities. Hanna and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington had been anti-violent nationalists before the Easter Rising, but after British authorities killed Francis after arresting him for trying to stop people from looting local stores, Hanna’s views sharpened. It was Hanna who organized a group of women to attend and disrupt the play as a response to what she deemed a disrespectful portrayal of the men of Easter week. The women sang ‘The Soldier’s Song’ and other nationalist fare, and then they rushed the stage before being physically thrown off. Men also participated in the row, but they were not part of the original planning and had simply been caught up in the fervor.

Plough’s depiction of the realistic nihilism of average Dublin men and women caught up in the violence of that week was shocking, as was the image of the plough and the stars itself being carried into a public house, and the presence of (and potential empathy for) Rosie Redmond. But Sheehy-Skeffington was clear in her messaging: her objections to the play were not moral. In fact, she claimed she did not want the play censored, instead insisting that it was too soon for the national theatre to stage a less than rosy picture of the events it depicted. Her newspaper exchanges with O’Casey about representation and the responsibility of the theatre lasted far beyond the play’s Abbey run; they revealed her strong political views while also showing her strong love and respect for her deceased husband. The letters reveal her discomfort with a storyline that reminds her of the visceral horrors of those days and the potential fear and pain that even the bravest men must have experienced.

It is the horrific nature of violence that took centre stage when Hynes directed Plough at the Abbey as an opening to the season from the 75th anniversary of the Rising. Hynes already had a strong reputation for fresh interpretations of Irish classics, including her excellent productions of Playboy of the Western World over the years, but rarely had she committed to a stylistic concept like her 1991 Plough. Reviews refer to Hynes’s choice of a minimalist set, the shaved heads of the performers, and the use of white makeup to make the characters look even more gaunt and forlorn. Plough’s men fight and women weep, but all are the victims of the violence that begets violence in her production: men and women, Catholics and Protestants, the youth and the elderly. The response was not quite a riot, but many pushed back vociferously against this clear directorial vision that deviated from the realistic approach of earlier productions.

Hynes is not tied to only one way of looking at Plough. Her most recent production of the play, which is part of DruidO’Casey, which is a much more traditional rendering of the play’s genre and aesthetic. Even in a production more grounded in realism, Nora Clitheroe and Bessie Burgess stand out as two different approaches to the violence of the men around them. O’Casey’s choice to make Protestant Bessie, whose son is a British soldier fighting in the Rising, the one who saves Nora’s life at the cost of her own is a bold one, particularly as this moment occurs during the Rising itself. Nora does cry, as The Irish Times reviewer wrote a century ago, but perhaps one the Plough’s strongest points is that crying and fighting are not mutually exclusive acts, nor do they cancel each other out. O’Casey’s play still bristles against easy stereotypes and verdicts, and that is precisely why it still has the power to get under our skins. It also serves as an excellent example of how gender politics are present and pressing even in plays from the turn of the twentieth century, and that there are still more important layers to the representation of women to plumb from these plays of the past. What themes will feel pressing to audiences in 2126? Only time will tell, but I do think The Plough and the Stars will remain a play of the past, present, and future of Irish theatre.