Yeats agreed with Lady Gregory and argued that removing any part of the play for reasons relating to anything other than dramatic tradition would be denying their traditions. Riots The play was first performed in front of a sold out crowd at Abbey Theatre due to the fact that a large portion of the seats had been reserved for government officials. The play was well received on its opening night on February 8, although Lennox Robinson wrote to Lady Gregory following the performance stating that the audience had been very excited, which made it a "bad audience to judge a play by". The first sign of displeasure among the audience occurred during the second act of the second performance of the play when Sighle Humphreys, a member of the Cumann na mBan, started to hiss from the back of the pit. When the curtains rose on 11 February to another full house the presence of Cumann na mBan and Sinn Féin members was hard to ignore. The women representing Cumann na mBan at the performance were all in some way related to men that had lost their lives during the Easter Rising, which created an atmosphere of expectations in the theater surrounding the topic of the Rising from the moment the play started. The riots began during the play's second act when Rosie Redmond, a prostitute, is seen lounging in the pub awaiting clients as the Figure in the Window, using the words of Patrick Pearse, declares that 'Bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood'. In contrasting the character of Rosie with the Figure's speech O'Casey compares the ideal dream of the patriots with what W. B. Yeats called the normal grossness of life. Clitheroe, Langon and Brennan then enter the stage in uniforms carrying the tricolour flag of the Irish Volunteers and the plough-and-stars flag of the Irish Citizen Army, which was perceived as an insult to the men who had died during the Rising. Some of the play's actors attempted to distance themselves from the roles they had played by asking the rioters to distinguish between the actors and the play, which was responded to in kind by a voice from the pit yelling "you have no right to earn your bread by insulting Ireland". Upon arriving to the theatre as the riots