The Silver Tassie

I didn’t really enjoy the National Theatre’s revival of Sean O’Casey’s 1928 First World War drama ‘The Silver Tassie’, or even find it dramatically satisfying. Nonetheless, Howard Davies’ production is one of the more extraordinary and haunting sights I’ve seen on the NT stage, and for all the problems with O'Casey’s text, its flurries of cracked poetry have a way of embedding deep in one’s cerebellum.

In three out of its four acts, ‘The Silver Tassie’ is a drama about a war-touched Dublin community, straightforward in style, albeit spiked with ornate language and the odd surreal flourish. Though other characters are almost perversely given greater stage time, the focus of the story lies with Ronan Raftery’s arrogant sporting hero Harry, who leaves Dublin a golden god and returns a paraplegic embarrassment.

The second act, though, is something else entirely. Set in a shattered chapel on the Allied lines, it compresses weeks – possibly even months – of the war into a wheezingly macabre sing-song that vaguely, horrifyingly apes a church service, building from the earthy babblings of an unhinged English private through folky, jokey reels up to almost hymnal high strains as a field gun is primed at the climax of the ‘service’. I didn’t feel much connection with it, but Davies marshals a staggeringly unsettling spectacle, and there’s great work from designer Vicki Mortimer – the transition between the first and second acts is, in a very literal sense, one of the most explosive things I’ve seen at the theatre.

Does it mesh with the rest of the play? I would say not – unnerving though they are, the stylized excesses of the second act seem to say less about the horror of the war than the blazing bitterness in Raftery’s voice as he decries the ‘the horrible sickness of life.' It’s an exceptional performance, but he’s marginalised, a bold dramatic move that doesn’t reap the emotional dividend it might. ‘The Silver Tassie’ is deeply problematic, but when all’s said and done it’s a true one-off of a play, given as good a production as one could imagine.