Christopher Gray enjoys a brilliant revival of a war classic
Sean O’Casey’s heart-breaking First World War drama The Silver Tassie is brilliantly revived under director Howard Davies at the National Theatre in recognition — it could hardly be called celebration — of the conflict’s centenary.
Booms and bangs as loud as any I have heard in a theatre powerfully convey what Wilfred Owen famously called “the monstrous anger of the guns”. These punctuate the expressionist second act which earned the disapproval of some of O’Casey’s contemporaries, including W.B. Yeats, who rejected the play for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
Perhaps he felt slight envy at its poetic depiction of the soldiers’ life. Set amid a ruined monastery (superbly achieved by designer Vicki Mortimer) the scene blends incantatory biblical language from a bloodied, brooding figure of death, the Croucher (Benjamin Dilloway), with a grim presentation of the horrors of the trenches and expression of the men’s understandable fury at “the shirkers sife [sic] at home”.
Framing this momentous episode is drama delivered in more conventional style, exploring the contrasting lives of those who fought and those who did not.
We begin at the Heegans’ home in an Irish coastal town where the comic verbal jousting of dad Sylvester (Aidan McArdle) and pal Simon Norton (Stephen Kennedy) is halted by the joyful irruption of the local footballers led to victory by the jubilant Heegan son Harry (excellent Ronan Raftery).
Drinks from the silver cup (the ‘tassie’) are necessarily brief for Harry must leave his mother (Josie Walker) and sweetheart Jessie (Deirdre Mullins) and sail, with colleague Teddy (Aidan Kelly) among others, for the killing fields of Northern France.
Fast-forward to Act III and we find Harry returned to a hospital ward, paralysed from the waist down. Susie Monican (Judith Roddy), all nagging piety before, is now a flighty nurse with a doting doctor (Jim Creighton). Jessie is absent from the group of visitors — dallying in the hospital grounds with another man (Adam Best).
As the climax approaches, at a football club dance, audience members are likely to be watching through tears, shed not only for Harry and the now-blinded Teddy but for the millions who died in the ‘war to end all wars’.
Susie supplies a final dark thought: “As long as wars are waged, we shall be vexed by woe; strong legs shall be made useless and bright eyes made dark. But we, who have come through the fire unharmed, must go on living.”
The Silver Tassie
The National Theatre
Until July 3
Box office: 020 7452 3000 nationaltheatre.org.uk
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