What happens in Act IV of The Plough and the Stars?
Act IV of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars unfolds during the Easter Rising of 1916. The tenement has turned into a battlefield: British soldiers have taken over the building, and the streets outside are on fire. Nora Clitheroe, reeling from a miscarriage caused by her frantic search for Jack amid the chaos, is mentally shattered, drifting in and out of grief. Fluther Good returns her safely from the turmoil, showing a rare moment of true bravery. Bessie Burgess, the unionist Protestant neighbor who has been at odds with the Clitheroes throughout the play, unexpectedly becomes Nora's protector, keeping watch at her bedside throughout the night. When Nora, driven by a delusion, stumbles to the window, thinking she hears Jack's voice, Bessie pulls her back — only to be shot by a British sniper who mistakes her movement for that of a combatant. Bessie dies slowly, cursing Nora in her pain. Meanwhile, Corporal Stoddart and Sergeant Tinley take over the flat, and the remaining residents of the tenement — Fluther, the Covey, Peter Flynn — are rounded up. The act ends with the soldiers making tea and singing a music-hall song while the city burns outside and Bessie's body lies on the floor.
Analysis
O'Casey's final act is a brilliant example of ironic juxtaposition, and the closing image drives this point home: two British soldiers cheerfully singing "Keep the 'Ome Fires Burning" over Bessie's corpse while Dublin smoulders. The domestic and the catastrophic coexist in the same frame, and neither cancels the other out — the horror lies in the fact that life’s small rhythms continue.
Bessie serves as the act's structural and moral core. O'Casey has spent three acts using her as a source of comic tension — loud, loyalist, combative — which makes her death feel like a genuine tragedy rather than a sentimental sacrifice. Her dying curse on Nora ("I saved your life an' you took mine") dismantles the usual notions of heroism: there is no nobility, only pain and bitter irony.
Nora's madness acts as a kind of displaced elegy. Unable to mourn Jack directly (his death is reported offstage), O'Casey conveys grief through her fractured mind, as her repeated delusions of domesticity — setting a table, waiting for Jack — echo the play's earlier scenes before the Rising, highlighting what the insurrection has destroyed.
The soldiers making tea is O'Casey's sharpest tonal move: the mundane becomes grotesque in context. This choice denies the audience the catharsis of a heroic finale, instead insisting on history's indifference to individual suffering. The Rising is neither glorified nor simply condemned — it’s depicted as a force that grinds through ordinary lives, leaving survivors to make tea among the dead.
Key quotes from Act IV
“I saved your life an' you took mine.”
Bessie's dying words to Nora, spoken as she bleeds from the sniper's bullet she took while pulling Nora from the window — the play's most concentrated statement of tragic irony.
“Th' whole city can topple home on top of you, for Bessie Burgess'll have a few dhrops left to see her into th' mornin'!”
Bessie's defiant declaration earlier in the act, establishing her stubborn vitality moments before the violence that will kill her.
“They're bringin' th' bodies of th' men that were shot in th' fight into th' Rotunda.”
Fluther's flat report on the Rising's casualties, one of several offstage dispatches O'Casey uses to keep the insurrection at a documentary distance while its consequences fill the stage.