The Silver Tassie

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

THE MILITARY term “theatre of war” suggests that battles happen within neat boundaries, that violence is orderly. Theatre

about

war explodes that fallacy. Rarely performed and still technically demanding, Sean O’Casey’s epic 1928 drama about Irish soldiers in the first World War reflects the chaos of warfare with every broken character, wayward structure and splintering style. It is a shattered drama about a shattered world.

Druid’s ambitious new production, directed by Garry Hynes, recognises a play full of jarring juxtapositions – a tragi-comedy about horror and loss which is full of movement and song – and it challenges the received wisdom that O’Casey’s work involves three realistic acts and one expressionistic detour into a symbolic battleground in France. From the moment Eamon Morrissey and John Olohan take to the stage, as two ever-present bowler-hatted codgers arguing about the specifics of a brawl, Hynes presents a play of expressive leaps and considered significance.

Even the Dublin tenement of the first act is a battleground overrun with combatants. Harry Heegan (Aaron Monaghan), returned from the front, brings home the football trophy of the title, from which he and his beloved (Aoife Duffin) drink, but everything is fractious. A lovelorn Susie (Clare Dunne) devotes herself to belligerent “tambourine theology”, his cheery neighbour Mrs Foran (Derbhle Crotty) sings curses about her violently abusive soldier husband, Teddy (Liam Carney) and Harry’s mother (Ruth Hegarty) hurries him back to the fray for fear of losing her separation allowance.

The famous second act is both the production at its strongest and the play at its most problematic. Francis O’Connor’s set is transformed, not into O’Casey’s ruined monastery, but a dizzyingly large tank with a rotating (and wobbling) turret, astride a tangle of religious icons, as though God had been crushed beneath its monstrous tracks.

In the haze around it, crumpled bodies twist into life – the Dublin Fusiliers or a chorus of the damned? – while Monaghan reappears as the ghoulish Croucher, a commanding physical spectre of lethargy, blasphemy and doom.

The nightmare is stunningly evinced, but apart from a chillingly affecting young choir, O’Casey’s numerous songs for the scene (performed by the cast and composed by Elliot Davis) feel thin, neither as grim nor comic as a genuine soldier’s song.

If the focus bleeds from the production afterwards, made diffuse by juddering location changes, a gallery of characters that barely have room to establish themselves and symbolic, unsentimental acts which expose war’s thankless sacrifice, it is because O’Casey’s main character is not the paralysed Harry, the sightless and humbled Teddy, or the survivors who shut them out: It is war itself.

In emulating the disorientation and illogic of war – where nationhood, morality and time seem equally mangled – so Harry, the silver tassie and even the play become battered and rattled. O’Casey’s vision is toweringly realised, but it is too broad to be affecting. For all the strength and discipline of the ensemble or the clarity of its depiction, the show never finds a way under your skin or into your dreams, as though Druid can’t bring peace to a play at war with itself.

Runs in Town Hall Theatre until September 7th, then tours Ireland and England. See druid.ie