SOURCE: A review of The Plough and the Stars, in The Times (London), No. 44271, May 14, 1926, p. 4.

In the following review of the London debut of The Plough and the Stars, the critic describes the audience's differing responses to the comic and tragic aspects of the play.

There is a familiar kind of battle-picture which shows groups of civilians moving confusedly across a smoky background of war. This is the general design of Mr. O'Casey's new play. His background is the rebellion of Easter Week in Ireland; his detached study is of the dwellers in a Dublin tenement, caught up in a movement to which none of them gives purposeful support but which they share with the same swift alternation of violence and indifference that they bring to their personal quarrels. And how they quarrel! And how much they enjoy it! In this company a death or an insult...