Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars," to be performed the rest of this week, concludes the engagement of the Abbey Theatre Players in Boston. Strongly resembling "June and the Paycock," it is a still grimmer indictment of war, a more tragic display of how human values are broken and lost when men die for a cause. The setting is the Easter uprising of 1916. It is again a woman who tries to salvage something from the torrent of destruction, but this time she falls and ends in madness. No one wins anything, in fact, except that the Tommies subdue Dublin, and march down the street singing "There's a silver lining." This Mr. O'Casey seems disposed to doubt.

There are, however, a few notes of Irish heroism sounding above the clang of futility. The material speeches, rapidly assorting that war is terrible but not evil and that there is no redemption except by blood, have as hollow a ring as a master of irony could give them. They are heard only as they soop into a pub, where a bartender and a prostitute occasionally listen. But when the British soldiers complain of the sniping, the answer. "Do you want us to come out in our skins and throw stones?" is almost happy, pugnacious patriotism.

The most absorbing element, of course, is the characters, and these cannot be considered separately from the actors. The representer is as Irish as the represented, and the Abby Players have done as much as Mr. O'Casoy in creating the persons of his plays. F. J. McCormick is Commandant Jack Clitheree, who quits the Irish Citizen's Army at the supplication of his wife, but returns when he learns that he is in a position of command, and dies. Mr. McCormick is a great actor, but he is the most shadowy of the major figures in this play. Eileen Crowe plays Nora, the wife. In her efforts to save her husband she mocks the barricaded rebels, and charges them with fear to admit their fear. One feels that she abhors the struggle only because it destroys here own happiness, for in trying to drag Jack out of the fight she is oblivious of the agony of a man dying at their feet, and in her insane delusion that Jack is about to return, she takes no notice of a woman's death for which she is responsible.

Stage Manager P. J. Carolan, in playing Fluther Good, presents an ordinary, ignorant, proud Dublin tenement-dweller with splendid vividness. M. J. Dolan is Uncle Peter Flynn, and amiable old man made the pathetic butt of a Socialist's humor. That socialist, played by Denis O'Dea, is reduced to pillaging and playing cards, nervously squatting on the floor of an attic, because he will not participate in a futile rebellion. Mareen Delany and May Craig are splendid as a pair of garrulous, short-tempered kind-hearted fishwives, the latter singing "Rule Brittania" throughout the uprising. All these people and several others comprise an intensely interesting gallery of figures, but the play suffers, and compares unfavorably with "June and the Paycock," through having no character of great tragic proportions.