[The Plough and the Stars is] about a war fought at home, with shells exploding in the streets and women shot as they stand at the windows. The war in question, the Easter Rebellion, Dublin, 1916, was less squalid than most: a revolution, a struggle for freedom. Out of it, said Yeats, "a terrible beauty is born."

O'Casey had a somewhat different view. In the first two acts of The Plough he gives us plenty of revolutionary rhetoric and shows it to us as heady stuff, better than beer—and popular for the same reason. The other two acts are devoted to revolutionary reality, including some unexpected heroism and some (highly comic) behavior that is distinctly less than heroic. But for O'Casey the essential reality of war, revolutionary or otherwise, no matter how splendid the principle for which it is fought, is pain, and pain dominates the last half...