Deconstructing Political Adaptations: Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars

Abstract

This essay seeks to question the relationship between source and target texts in adaptations by looking at two versions of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars—John Ford’s film version, produced for RKO in 1935, and Nadia Molinari’s radio revival broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2011. It will discuss the practical as well as artistic issues determining how a classic theatrical text was reinterpreted for different media: Ford’s Plough and the Stars was shaped by the director’s propagandist desire to reconstruct the Irish rebels as noble ‘unlike O’Casey’s original aim, which was to show how the urban culture was destroyed by the Easter Rising’ so as to emphasize the futility of the rebels’ cause). In 1921 Ford had visited Ireland and encountered some of the major figures in the republican movement. By contrast, Molinari’s radio production communicates multiple meanings; it is simultaneously an indictment of the Easter Rising and its consequences, a vivid recreation of the world of 1916 Dublin through sound effects and songs, and a quasi-melodrama—especially at the end, when the innocent fruit vendor Bessie Burgess (Gabrielle Ready) passes away. More significantly both adaptations underline just how difficult it is to define what a “political” adaptation actually involves. They are not just preoccupied with Irish politics at a specific point in time (the early twentieth century), but also demonstrate how the personal (understood in this context as a manifestation of individual “emotions”) and the political are often inseparable. This fusion is not only evident in thematic terms (as the Easter Rising has a profound effect on the characters’ lives) but also influences the way adaptations have been constructed.