o'cASEY'S HELL OF A PLAY MADE GREAT ART FROM THE gREAT WAR
Saturday August 28 2010
When Sean O'Casey left for London in 1926, his star was in the ascendant. The railwayman who had turned to full-time writing in his late 30s had, in the space of just four years, completed a trilogy of plays that would rank as one of the great achievements of Irish theatre.
Juno and the Paycock was a hit in London; the day O'Casey arrived, he was interviewed by four of the London newspapers. He was given temporary honorary membership of the Garrick Club (he hated it), and won a major playwriting award.
Then The Plough and the Stars opened, and O'Casey had two successful plays running simultaneously. He complained to friends that he couldn't get any work done with all the attention.
When O'Casey got back down to writing, it was a play that was a natural successor to The Plough.
Throughout The Plough, Bessie Burgess reminds us of the larger war that was the backdrop to the 1916 Rising: the Republican volunteers, she cries, were "stabbin' in th' back th' men that are dyin' in th' trenches for them."
In his new play, The Silver Tassie (which opened on Monday in Galway, prior to a national tour), O'Casey now turned to those men, the Irish in the trenches of France.
The burning buildings of Dublin were replaced with the scarred wastelands of the Front, but many of the signature aspects of his earlier plays remained: the core of working-class Dublin characters, oppressed by poverty and war; the lyrical wit of their speech; the resilience of their song.
Yet O'Casey knew that the Great War, unprecedented in scale and efficiency of slaughter, demanded something different, both in tone and in style.
In a boldly experimental second act, he sought to portray the life of the soldiers on the Front with the kind of broad brush strokes and jarring colours that characterised "expressionist" art, like The Scream by Edvard Munch.
He placed his weary soldiers in a grotesque setting littered with corpses and religious icons, replaced the dialogue with chanted verse, and discarded the heroics and individual tragedy of The Plough.
"You really are a ruthless ironfisted blaster and blighter of your species," George Bernard Shaw wrote to him, "in this play, there is none righteous -- no, not one."
Though Shaw thought it "a hell of a play", that was hardly a recipe for commercial success. Yet O'Casey needed it to be, because he was broke.
He had got married ("Sean O'Casey weds in a pullover," was the headline in one of the London papers), and his wife, Eileen, was now pregnant. The couple were living beyond their means in middle-class London.
O'Casey sent the play to the Abbey, expecting it to readily gain productions in Dublin and London. But Yeats, the Abbey's most influential director, hated it.
"You have no subject," Yeats wrote to O'Casey.
The mere greatness of the world war has thwarted you; it has refused to become mere background."
Yeats's letter arrived in a house in domestic chaos -- a baby had arrived that same day and the boiler in the bathroom had burst shortly before, nearly killing Eileen.
Amidst this confusion (and celebrations), O'Casey was in no mood for special pleading.
He refuted Yeats with precision and fury, accused the Abbey of a conspiracy, and promptly moved to publish all the correspondence.
Eventually, O'Casey secured a production in London, starring the great Charles Laughton, later to star as Quasimodo in the film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The Times thought it "almost a masterpiece" but although the reviews were mostly good, it failed to find an audience and closed after eight weeks.
Still, O'Casey refused to plámás potential producers. He heard from a friend that Hilton Edwards was interested in staging the play at the Gate (an ideal venue for it) because he thought the play should be "given a chance", despite its problems.
O'Casey was so outraged at the perceived slight that he wrote to Edwards, saying his own London producer had "more genuine appreciation of dramatic art in his arse than you have in either your heart or your head".
The Tassie was eventually staged at the Abbey in 1935. It had "a vileness that is appalling", wrote one reviewer, lambasting its "obscenity" and "blasphemy".
It closed after a week.
After a visit that year, O'Casey never returned to Ireland, and never again had a new play staged at the Abbey.
In a sense, both Yeats and O'Casey were right. Yeats knew that drama needed a hero to hang on; yet O'Casey knew that the Great War defied heroism, and needed a new kind of drama.
The Silver Tassie survives as an outstanding war play: grim, gripping, jarring, relentlessly unsentimental (O'Casey's Dublin plays can be easily undermined by sentimental acting).
This tour by Druid (see www.druid.ie) is a hugely ambitious undertaking. Its success would be a fitting tribute to O'Casey.
I relied on Christopher Murray's superb biography of O'Casey for the historical material above.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
Irish Independent
