SOURCE: Lowery, Robert G. Introduction to A Whirlwind in Dublin: ‘The Plough and the Stars’ Riots, edited by Robert G. Lowery, pp. 3-7. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

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...