The National Theatre’s revival of Sean O’Casey’s play comes a few months too late for the centenary of the Easter Rising which it partly depicts; however, since one of the characters has a son on the Western Front in WW1, the timing arguably addresses the centenaries of both the Rising and the Battle of the Somme. Howard Davies directs (in collaboration with Jeremy Herrin) with his characteristic mastery of large-cast, large-scale international work.

If O’Casey had written nothing else, this portrait of the inhabitants of a Dublin tenement building would have put him among the great dramatists of the last two centuries. Unlike its predecessors in his “Dublin trilogy”, The Shadow Of A Gunman and Juno And The Paycock, it overdoes neither the comic bombast of working-class language nor the melodrama when events turn grave.

The first two acts, set in autumn 1915, are lighter; the second act contains a typical stark O’Casey contrast, as humorous bust-ups escalate in a pub whilst just outside can be heard the actual words of the iconic republican Padraig Pearse. Even Act Three revels in its contradictions, as folk take advantage of the gunfire in the streets to dash off and loot the shops. The final act, however, is harrowing, with two predictable deaths offstage and a shocking third on. It makes for O’Casey’s clearest parable that his land contains all kinds of folk with all kinds of foibles, yet even the most dishonourable of them can nurse a sincere passion for Ireland, which in turn may be their unjust undoing... yet it is not only his clearest but also his most human.

Fionn Walton and (especially) Judith Roddy excel as Jack and Nora Clitheroe, an idealistic officer in the rebel Citizen Army and his foreboding wife. Lloyd Hutchinson gets dolled up in ridiculous paramilitary finery as the self-regarding but hollow Peter Flynn, and Justine Mitchell as Unionist Bessie Burgess insults one of the insurrectionists, a butcher, with the now-surprising chant “Choke a chicken!”  Vicki Mortimer’s sets of crumbling masonry and James Farncombe’s grimy, brooding lighting add to the cumulative effect of this journey from easy indulgence to a climax of grief (Irish) and shame (English).

Written for the Financial Times.