Come Here To Me!

Go, fetch to me a pint o’ wine,
And fill it in a silver tassie,
That I may drink before I go.
A service to my bonie lassie

From that song came the footballer, Harry Heegan, who won the cup and went to war, and the entire narrative of The Silver Tassie….Sean had spoken with great excitement and urgency of his treatment of the second act in the war zone on The Western Front.
–Eileen O’ Casey from ‘Sean’

The 1920s in Britain produced plenty of literature, plays and drama inspired by the ‘Great War’. The majority of this of course was almost nostalgic, reflecting the soldiers of the empire as a unified organisation of heroes. It was also for the most part the product of men who had been nowhere near the war, and C. Desmond Greaves remarked in his excellent study of the politics of Sean O’ Casey that in such works “..officers and gentlemen emitted the cosy sentiments of the cricket field”.

The cosy repackaging of the war was a long way removed from the view held by many in the labour movement of course. James Connolly had written in the midst of the war that “the carnival of murder on the continent will be remembered as a nightmare in the future”, a view no doubt shared by O’ Casey. In The Silver Tassie, O’ Casey’s excellent anti-war play, we see a rejection of the more comfortable version of events. Like Connolly before him, O’ Casey saw the war as nothing but the slaughter of working class men.

The Abbey rejection of The Silver Tassie is well documented. It was perhaps unsurprising, owing to the response to The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and the new direction of O’ Casey’s work. Yeats famously wrote to O’ Casey that “…you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields, never walked in its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions.” Yet O’ Casey had seen the horror of the war firsthand. While at St. Vincent’s Hospital he had been in the presence of men completely destroyed by the war. His own brothers had been in the British army, and like any working class Dubliner O’ Casey had seen men walking around the city as shadows of their former selves. The hurt caused to O’ Casey by the rejection of the play was perhaps clearest when he refused to meet Lady Gregory in London, despite her writing of her desires to see the play there.

Men of the 10th (Irish) Division.

The play has remained a tricky one, not least owing to the strong emphasis O’ Casey placed on music in the work. Druid have done a wonderful job of tackling one of the core O’ Casey plays however, and this production is grand in scale. Opening in a Dublin tenement, like The Plough and the Stars before it, we are first introduced to two excellent comic characters in the form of Sylvester and Simon. The extremely likeable Eamon Morrissey shines as Sylvester Heegan. Morrissey no doubt has a soft spot for the play, as he appeared in a 1972 production of it at the Abbey. In an article earlier this year for the Galway Advertiser Morrissey noted that ” His (Sylvester’s) character, and that of his friend, Simon Norton, are directly influenced by Laurel & Hardy so they do bring that comic element to the play but Sylverster is very real and there are all sorts of layers to both characters.” They open the play on a light note, discussing the heroics of Harry Heegan, the son of Sylverster. Upon Harry’s arrival, we see the gladiator of a man we have heard so much hero-worship about. Aaron Monaghan delivers an excellent performance as Harry, a hero of the football field who leaves two loves- a love and football and a love of the beautiful Jessie- for the horror of war.

These are a lost generation, a youth doomed to fight a war O’ Casey saw as meaningless. Men who were giants on the football pitch are shown to us in the second act as men completely broken by the horror before them. Smoke fills the stage, a giant tank takes centre space with its barrel reaching out into the audience. It’s a surreal picture, these men singing songs in the “pissings of rain” that capture the horror of what they are experiencing. As Greaves wrote “Religion hovers over the whole play. But in this act it is flesh, blood and bone. It dominates everything”. A crucifix is dwarfed by the large tank,and it is clear O’ Casey lays much blame at the altar of the church. Greaves wrote that O’ Casey “…decided to shift the blame for the war from capitalist imperialism to the church”. To O’ Casey however, one feels perhaps the two went hand in hand. The portrayal of the miseries of war is powerful. The influence of Philip Chevron is clear on the direction of the music here, and the songs pack a punch. Anger and sorrow are evident, in a strumming guitar or a shouting voice.

The war destroys Harry. We see him in a wheelchair, and come to realise that he has lost the love of his life as well as the use of his legs. O’Casey presents the returning men not as heroes but fragile victims. The sight of a blind man next to a crippled one lamenting their losses in the final act could not be further removed from the romantic presentation of the war at the time. There is no nationalist sentiment to the work, like in The Plough and the Stars O’ Casey aims to show the lives of people being destroyed by conflict. His politics are clear not just when we see broken men before a tank, but when a blind man and a crippled one find themselves in the corner of a dinner party.

To Sean O’ Casey war was the slaughter of the working class and little else. The Silver Tassie remains one of his most important works, and Druid have done a wonderful job in capturing the spirit of the work, through magnificent sets, musical arrangements and an extremely strong cast. It is no doubt one of the grandest productions of O’ Casey’s work in the capital to date, and it is now due to travel elsewhere.