The Play

Abstract

After devoting two seasons to their private affairs, the Abbey Theatre Players have come rolling into town again. Joy be unto them and us. Last evening they opened their day-to-day repertory at the Golden Theatre with a revival of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars,¹ which was first performed here by another troupe in 1927. After an interval of seven years, it still looks like a masterpiece in the raffish production of the Abbey company and still sounds like a masterpiece in the lilt of their voices. It did seem to this herald last evening that some of the players, particularly Barry Fitzgerald and Michael J. Dolan, had not yet adjusted their voices to the spaces of the Golden Theatre, and that Mr Fitzgerald had not yet made the proper compromise between brogue and intelligibility. Some of his most pungent lines were tangled in his bristling mustache. It is well to get criticism done with in the opening paragraph, for these lines are intended as a jubilant review and a cordial greeting to one of the grandest band of actors in the world today.

The New York Times (13 Nov. 1934).