The Silver Tassie

Town Hall Theatre, Galway Previews until Fri Opens Tomorrow-Sep 7 091-569777 www.tht.ie

For a renowned pacifist, Seán O'Casey has certainly been through the wars. When republican rhetoric took a turn for the bloodthirsty, he sat out the Easter Rising and recorded the distance between its myths and a tenement-level reality. The riots that greeted the resulting play, The Plough and the Stars, in 1926 were not the last of his battles. Two years later the Abbey rejected his bold, expressionistic meditation on the first World War, and another conflagration broke out in The Irish Times. The Silver Tassieopened in London instead.

With both plays now on the Irish stage, perhaps formal hostilities have ceased. But, following a public spat between Druid and the Abbey two years ago over performing rights to O'Casey's work, some may see these simultaneous O'Casey productions, each heavy with history, as either a détente or a standoff. The Silver Tassie, though, is a minefield of its own. A rarely performed tragicomedy that serves as a bitter indictment of war, its swoop from realism to a symbol-strewn battlefield is here realised on an epic scale by director Garry Hynes with her largest-ever company of actors, live music and dance. That ambition is exciting to say the least. The silver trophy of O'Casey's title shimmers with shifting meaning but with Druid's latest campaign set to tour nationwide, O'Casey's work is a prize worth fighting for.

Can’t See That? Catch This

The Plough and the StarsAbbey Theatre, Dublin