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Nyree Yergainharsian (Rosie Redmond) and Ger Kelly (bartender) in The Plough and the Stars. Ros Kavanaugh/Abbey TheatreRos Kavanaugh

The Abbey Theatre is paying a visit to Canada for the first time in 26 years. The Irish national theatre is in Toronto until Sunday with an entertaining and unsettling production of The Plough and the Stars, Sean O'Casey's famous, riot-inciting 1926 play about the Easter Rising.

This particular production is an intriguing one to take on tour, since it's an outsider take on the Irish classic – Sean Holmes being the first non-Irish director to tackle this play at the Dublin-based theatre that birthed it.

The Abbey's looked beyond its borders since it opened in 1904, of course – and influenced others abroad when it became the first state-subsidized theatre in the English-speaking world in 1925.

Britain's National Theatre was founded in 1963 – while the National Theatre of Scotland only dates to this millennium. In recent years, however, as the Abbey has extricated itself from one of its periodic financial crises, it's been less influential internationally than those newcomers.

Which brings us to this North American tour. O'Casey's tragedy shows us a group of working-class Dubliners in the lead-up to the 1916 insurrection against British rule known as the Easter Rising.

At the centre of the action is Nora Clitheroe (Kate Stanley Brennan) and her husband, Jack (Ian-Lloyd Anderson), a bricklayer who will eventually take up arms despite his wife's pleading.

In the tenement where they live, they're surrounded by a group of misfits including an alcoholic carpenter named Fluther (the terribly charming David Ganly), an overeager communist called the Young Covey (an almost acrobatic Ciaran O'Brien) and a girl dying of consumption named Mollser (the compelling, mostly silent Rachel Gleeson).

Holmes, who runs the Lyric Hammersmith in London, is not just an outsider in Ireland, but also at home where he defines himself in opposition to what he sees as a conservative streak in British theatre. At the Lyric and elsewhere, he's imported and promoted aesthetics and practices – messy, visceral, playful – associated with German theatre.

His production of The Plough and the Stars, then, begins with Mollser, clad in a Manchester United jersey, singing the Irish national anthem hesitantly into a microphone – only to cough up blood all over the lyric sheet.

It's a startling moment in keeping with O'Casey's skeptical take on rebellion as glorified in the anthem's lyrics. Nationalism is only an idea, but the fragility of our bodies is a reality. Is it worth sacrificing one for the other?

Jon Bausor's set gives us a deconstructed Dublin that is a place of physical labour – a construction site, with a tall tower of metal scaffolding and of graffiti-covered sheets of plywood.

Brennan and Anderson bring the body into play from the start in a very sexy scene that takes place on a fold-out couch with Jack serenading Nora through a microphone. We see exactly what Jack is risking for notions of manliness and nation.

In addition to occasionally picking up a microphone, the actors in Holmes's production also speak many of their lines straight out rather than to each other – so characters representing points of view make their wordy arguments directly to the audience.

And yet Holmes's production is very respectful to O'Casey's text, keeping it intact as it staggers from broad comedy to Irish Ibsenism to high tragedy. The distance he keeps between the performances and the play allows us to be forgiving of, and even receptive to, the writing's excesses.

With this production and the hiring of new artistic directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren (both recently of the National Theatre of Scotland), it looks as if Ireland's national theatre really wants to be noticed internationally again – and feels that this will come by bringing in artistic leadership from outside. Canadians can relate to the paradox.

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