Eileen Walsh returns to Cork for her new play The Plough and the Stars

After her fun-filled turn in Catastrophe, Cork actress Eileen Walsh returns home in the Abbey’s production of a Sean O’Casey classic, writes Padraic Killeen

IT’S EARLY March, a week before the opening night of the Abbey Theatre’s new production of Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. One of the show’s own stars, Eileen Walsh, who plays the fiery Bessie Burgess in the play, sits in the rehearsal room reflecting on the resonances between O’Casey’s Dublin of 1916, a city mired in poverty and desperation, and the one that she was struck by since returning from her home in London for the production.

“The amount of sleeping bags on the street totally shocked me,” she says. “Not just the fact that people were sleeping rough, but the actual amount of sleeping bags that had been left in doorways for people to come back to. And then there is the amount of families living in hotels, which is unheard of anywhere else. That’s just shocking. We’re reduced back to a time when too many people were sharing one small room, with no real ability to cook at home or to have some kind of privacy. So we’re not that far away from it. We’re 100 years down the line and we’re not that far from it actually.”