The Silver Tassie

Oh dear. This play had some good reviews too. But it is best put down as pretentious nonsense, likeable only by a professional critic. Of course it can't really be pretentious as its delivered in an Irish accent and its anti-war which should make it ok. But it really isn't. The play opens conventionally enough in an Irish home, with a young man returning from helping his team win a football game, before returning to the front line in the First World War. This scene just drags. Worse follows.

Now comes the theatrical coup de grace. The stage (rather brilliantly) alters in steps to the ruins of a church with added pyrotechnics. The BBC article I read described this as  the play turns from the more naturalistic speech of the rest of the play to a style of dialogue drawing on the Old Testament, the Catholic Latin mass and music-hall. Basically the section is done in a lot of chanting. Far from an effective device, it just makes the dialogue hard to follow. So the scene drags even more.

And then we return to find our hero has been paralyzed from the waist down. We see him first in hospital where his girl no longer wants to see him, and then finally at a party to celebrate his football team's win, with him now an angry man forgotten by the able-bodied and shunned by his ex-girlfriend who has a new fella in tow.

All this should leave plenty of room for pathos. But the middle section does nothing (except maybe it ought to win an award for best set design) and frankly the pathos is buried. There is a lot of the totally unfunny sort of banter between unnecessary side characters which one often finds in Shakespeare. Indeed you rather felt that the playwright, Sean O'Casey, fancied himself as the Irish Shakespeare. Added to the fact this has a cast of 25, its fair to say its unlikely to get many more revivals, being disinterred now only because of the First World War centenary. There are so many better plays on the subject than this one. Hopefully it will be re-buried now and rest in peace in a dusty drawer for eternity.