[In the following essay, an introduction to a book-length collection of reviews of Sean O'Casey's play The Plough and the Stars, performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, Lowery compares the Abbey audience of 1907, when the audiences rioted in response to Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, with the 1926 audience that vehemently protested the Abbey's production of O'Casey's play.]

O'Casey is considered by many the only Irish playwright who can thus far compare with John M. Synge, although it is difficult to discover an adequate basis on which to judge them together.

—Curtis Canfield, Plays of the Irish Renaissance (1929)

The riots surrounding the 1926 productions of The Plough and the Stars are invariably compared with similar disturbances of the 1907 production of John M. Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World. There is too much surface similarity to be ignored. Certainly the central figures of the Plough controversy were aware of the parallels: William Butler Yeats invoked them in his famous speech at the Abbey; Lady Augusta Gregory fretted over the disturbing possibilities before anything happened; and news stories did not mention one without mentioning the other. Those who protested against the Plough considered the occasion another insult to the Irish people in the tradition of the Playboy; and those who condemned the protesters pointed to the shameful tradition of theatre protest, a tradition which definitely included the Playboy.

Few can deny that certain essential similarities existed between the two occasions. In both instances a “disgraceful” play appeared on the stage of the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, offending a sizable segment of the audience. In each case the playwright was accused of defaming Ireland's national honor, good name, and people. In both examples the protests began in the theatre and disrupted the play; they spread to the Dublin newspaper columns and involved a number of Ireland's intellectuals and writers as well as several ordinary letter-to-the-editor writers.

The protesters in each case were similar. In each instance the police were called to eject the disrupters, who sang the same songs and shouted the same slogans in 1926 as they did in 1907. Both groups accused Synge and O'Casey of creating “stage Irishmen” and of distorting reality. Each group, particularly the letter writers, demanded that Ireland apply the same standards of dramatic expression as England and the United States did—meaning that since neither of those countries would tolerate such an insult, why should Ireland? Further, one finds that in addition to turning their wrath against the dramatists, the protesters cast a major portion of the blame for disgracing Ireland on the directors of the Abbey Theatre.

The defenders of the plays used similar logic in their rebuttals. Both plays, they said, were examples of drama at its finest. The characters in the plays, while distorted, were exaggerated only in the best tradition of dramatic license and were not meant to be accurate portrayals from everyday life. Moreover, said the defenders, a national theatre could not be either national or a theatre without freedom of artistic expression.

Finally, there were miscellaneous parallels. For example, in each case the Abbey players resolved to continue the production despite threats and dangers, and in each case several people maintained that while they did not like the plays, those concerned had the right to see them performed and to have them receive a fair hearing.

There were, however, major differences between the two occasions. First, the historical settings were nineteen years apart. The Ireland of Synge was not the Ireland of O'Casey. By 1926 the country had been through a psyche-shattering culmination of political and social events which claimed the flower of a generation as victims. Within a space of nine years (1913-1922), the Dublin working class was crushed, leaders were executed, cities and towns were burned and terrorized, and documents and treaties were bandied about while a Kafkaesque civil war raged.

The Ireland of Synge had none of this except in the minds of the destined few. The trauma of Synge's Ireland was from divisions created by the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland's Home Rule champion in the British Parliament. Though this event was not without major impact, the event itself passed without assassinations, death and destruction, or new gravesites. Synge's Ireland remembered the 1898 centenary celebrations of the United Irishmen and the antirecruiting campaign of the Boer War. Trade union leader James Larkin was in Belfast and a major strike uniting Protestant and Catholic workers was only months away. Most of all, though, this Ireland had various gradations of Irish-Irelanders. If the Ireland of 1907 did not have newfound martyrs, it did have enthusiasm in its search for Daniel Corkery's hidden Ireland, for W. B. Yeats's Celtic twilight, and for Douglas Hyde's Gaelic League. Societies and clubs formed throughout the country to study a language, a literature, and a dream. The infant Abbey Theatre, only three years old, was immersed in a thousand-year-old revival, and the peasant dramas brought an elegant simplicity to the stage.

The essential difference, then, between the two periods was that the Ireland of 1907 was going somewhere; the Ireland of 1926 had been there. The former had its head in the clouds; the latter had crashed to earth. In 1907 there was life; in 1926 there were only martyrs.

The second major difference was in the plays themselves. Both plays dealt with similar socioeconomic groups: Synge's peasants and O'Casey's working class. But O'Casey's drama had one thing that was absent from Playboy: a national shrine. O'Casey's use of the 1916 Rising (then being commemorated in its tenth year) was central to the protesters' anger. Rosie Redmond and Pegeen Mike were objectionable for puritanical reasons; Nora was unacceptable because she did not embody the image of Patrick Pearse's “Mother” and because, according to the protesters, she disgraced the women of 1916. Further, it was one thing to show Christy Mahon as a rogue; Ireland was full of that type. But it was something else to show Jack Clitheroe and others as “cowards,” especially during an event considered by many as almost equivalent to Lourdes.

Finally, there were differences in the chronology and intensity of the protests. Though both premieres were sold out, the Playboy audience dwindled substantially after the first night. Reviewers wrote of a “very thin” house of “small dimensions.” The Plough, however, was booked solid for the week and played to full houses for the entire run. The Playboy riots began on the first night and continued with growing intensity for several nights. But the Plough disturbances did not occur until the fourth night (although there were a few minor catcalls during the second and third performances). For this reason the newspapers in 1926 were unable to fan the discontent as they had done in 1907. During Playboy, violent exchanges of opinions appeared in the press immediately following the first night. But the Plough gained a respite and large numbers were able to see and judge the play without being influenced by the controversy. Moreover, in 1907 the protesters were led by men who did considerable damage to the Abbey's interior. In 1926 the protesters, mainly women, did more disrupting than damage.

There was, then, both similarity and difference between the disturbances surrounding the Playboy and the Plough. Both situations were as much a result of the circumstances surrounding the plays as of the contents of the plays, yet the circumstances and contents were different. The protesters adopted similar methods and rationalizations for their actions, though their actions varied in degree, direction, and chronology.

Between the years of Playboy and Plough, the Abbey Theatre's fortunes fluctuated. Lady Gregory recorded a decline dating from 1915, a recovery in 1918, but another serious reversal after the civil war. By 1923 the Abbey was dependent on foreign tours to break even and, in that year, requested (unsuccessfully) a remittance of taxes from the government. In 1924, the theatre directors mortgaged their building for the first time to pay off overdrafts, and it was estimated that a loss of £4000 had been incurred since 1912. Despite this, there was breathing room, with some small discretionary funds available, but barely enough for more than minor repairs.

It is not difficult to imagine the fate of the Abbey had O'Casey not appeared. Few now doubt that it was his plays The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and Juno and the Paycock (1924) which literally saved the Abbey from bankruptcy. Lady Gregory recorded that they were “immense” successes and, more often than not, filled the theatre with paying customers.

Perhaps because of this, the Abbey was finally awarded a small subsidy (£850) in 1925 by the Irish government, not half of what was requested and only a fraction of what was needed, but it was a start. With the subsidy and with O'Casey's plays drawing well and his promise of a new and more ambitious drama to come, the future looked bright.