Scattergun approach to anti-war epic

THE SILVER TASSIE, Lowry, Salford

SEAN O’Casey’s “great” anti-war work was famously rejected by WB Yeats for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the spurious notion that O’Casey had too little experience of war for it to be realistic.

If he had been more honest, Yeats might simply have suggested the playwright go away and write a better play.

For Tassie is wayward: in some ways ahead of its time, in others naive, but also unfocused and vague, a collection of characters and ideas that coalesce almost by accident.

Or perhaps this is just a reaction to Galway’s Druid company and its admittedly epic staging, with 19 cast members and a second act (set at the Front) which fills the Lowry’s Quays stage with an oversized First World War tank, turret panning, Dalek-like, over the audience.

Footballing friends Harry (the always-intense Aaron Monaghan) and Ben (Brian Gleeson) win the cup — the tassie — for their Dublin team. That same night they sail off to help the English fight the war.

In act two the men are cold and wet and Harry is shell-shocked. In act three he is recuperating in hospital from a blast that has paralysed his legs, and in act four he realises, bitterly, that the life he knew, with the girl he loved on that first night of football victory, is over — she is now with able-bodied Ben.

The message is obvious: war changes lives, and rarely for the better. You can hardly argue with this but in the context of the even bigger war that was to come, and those since, Harry and his friends suffer events that are a drop in a murky ocean.

On top of this war-isn’t-nice tale, O’Casey offers too much of Dubliners being Oirish — the comic veteran pair (Eamon Morrissey and John Olohan) in their bowlers, inane at their first attempt to answer a phone; the clinging mother (Ruth Heegan); the religious fervour of Harry’s rejected would-be girlfriend (Clare Dunne) among them.

These characters crowd into a tale that when you boil it down and exclude all the poetic chit-chat — not to mention the songs, O’Casey’s lyrics set to new melodies by Elliot Davis — it’s four acts that would make a rather good two-act play.