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 February 11 to another full house the presence of Cumann na mBan and Sinn Fein 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.