O'Casey The Silver Tassie

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31519-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten

Ireland, World War One. Dashing Harry Heegan leads his football team to victory, arriving home in swaggering celebration before he grabs his kit and heads for the trenches. A nightmare world awaits, the men, reduced to cannon fodder, speaking in mangled incantations as the casualties stack up. Months later, Harry returns, a cripple at the football club party. Everyone but the shattered war veterans dance and forget. Peppered with acrid wit and dark vaudeville humour, The Silver Tassie, Sean O'Casey's powerful anti-war play of 1928, receives a major revival at the National Theatre in April 2014.

Sean O'Casey

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Casey, Sean

Leseproben

Introduction

JAMES MORAN

In the mid-1920s, Sean O’Casey made his name by writing a trio of plays that are all set in Dublin’s tenements at different points during the Irish revolution of 1916–23. These plays were premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and enjoyed immediate critical and commercial success. In 1923 the declared O’Casey’s debut work, , to be ‘brilliant, truthful, decisive’ and ‘flawless’. In 1925 his next play, won the Hawthornden literary prize, and in 1926 the described the premiere of O’Casey’s third major play, , as ‘the high-water mark of public interest in the work of the Abbey Theatre’. The had nonetheless angered some nationalists, who rioted in response to that production and helped trigger O’Casey’s decision to move to London. Here he was visited by two of the Abbey Theatre directors, W.B. Yeats and Lennox Robinson, who implored him to send his next play to the Abbey: he promised and did.

In March 1928 the author was known to have submitted a new script to the Abbey, and Dublin anticipated another triumph. O’Casey had proven himself capable of writing with insight and inventiveness about the way that residents of Dublin had been affected by wartime. The new play, , would deal with the First World War (the conflict that had preceded and triggered those which his other plays had described) and would begin in the domestic apartments of Dublin, thus potentially extending his well-received trilogy into a tetralogy. In April 1928 the excitedly reported that ‘friends of Mr O’Casey who have been privileged to read his new play have passed high opinions on its merits, and its production is being eagerly awaited’. Indeed, O’Casey received words of encouragement from the playhouse as he completed and submitted the work, with one of the theatre’s directors, Lady Gregory, writing, ‘I long to see it – I’m sure the wine you have filled it with is of the best vintage’. In fact, O’Casey felt so sure that the Abbey would produce the work that he even submitted a suggested cast list along with the script.

However, for O’Casey disaster then struck. The Abbey rejected the play. Notoriously, the theatre’s founding director W.B. Yeats guided the managerial decision, and wrote a high-handed letter to O’Casey declaring: ‘You are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions. You illustrate those opinions by a series of almost unrelated scenes as you might in a leading article’.

O’Casey felt distressed by this dismissal, and he had good reason to feel upset. The rejection letter failed even to spell his name correctly, even though his plays had bankrolled the Abbey Theatre during recent lean years. In fact, his earlier work, , was being revived at the Abbey at exactly the same time that the directors were rejecting O’Casey’s new play, meaning that the audience’s appreciation for O’Casey was literally ringing in the directors’ ears as they turned down his latest effort. One of the directors wrote to O’Casey to say, ‘I return the M.S. of . As I write this I hear the audience cheering .’

In a fit of pique at Yeats’s behaviour – particularly Yeats’s ‘face saving’ suggestion that O’Casey himself should withdraw the play in order to rewrite it – O’Casey decided to publish all the related correspondence about the rejection in the and the , bringing public attention to the spat. Yeats felt so shocked by this indiscretion that he took to his bed for two days. But the decision to publish that material caused most long-term damage to O’Casey himself. His play would long be associated with Yeats’s harsh words and with that 1928 verdict that the script is not stageworthy. Since then it has rarely been grouped with the earlier three plays, and has been seen on stage far less frequently.

So why had Yeats led his fellow directors in declining ? Well, there may have been some professional rivalry involved, as Yeats himself worked as a playwright and his dramas had tanked at the Abbey box office during O’Casey’s period of success. But, more fundamentally, Yeats had deep misgivings about the whole idea of literary writers tackling the topic of the world war. When Yeats edited the 1936 he consciously omitted the war poets, famously explaining that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’. So many people had grown obsessed by military conflict, but Yeats declared, ‘I give it as little thought as I can.’

O’Casey, by contrast, gave the war a great deal of thought, and felt exasperated by Yeats’s attitude. O’Casey had never seen action, but he knew a great deal about the conflict’s victims. During 1915 he had needed surgery on tubercular glands in his neck, and found himself admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, which had been commandeered as a field hospital. Here O’Casey witnessed at first hand the sufferings of the gassed, the shell-shocked, and the maimed. In particular, O’Casey saw the sad way that his own surgeon at the hospital, Richard Tobin, had been deeply affected by the recent death of a son. The younger Tobin was a talented Dublin sportsman whose prowess had often been described in the Irish newspapers and who had played in a rugby team representing his father’s hospital in 1914, but who had then enlisted in a ‘pals’ battalion’ and died at the Dardanelles. This tale, and other terrible stories, circulated on the wards that O’Casey inhabited during 1915, preparing the way for ’s tragic narrative.

Yeats preferred literary writers to keep the war in the background, but also disliked the theatrical style that O’Casey was now developing. O’Casey wanted to avoid being defined by what drama critic Huntley Carter had called ‘stark realism’, and felt increasingly fascinated by theatrical expressionism. In 1925 O’Casey had seen a performance of the play by the German expressionist Ernst Toller, which proceeds by alternating episodes that advance the story with dream scenes that develop the meaning and significance of the action. In an admiring O’Casey attempted to do something similar, and so his first-act realism moves into a fantastical second act where he sought to develop the meaning of the opening section by abandoning the naturalistic setting as well as all the characters he had just introduced.

For Yeats, this had simply made into an incoherent mish-mash. But that opinion was contradicted by the English theatrical manager Charles Cochran, who declared that the second act was ‘without exception the finest symbolic scene I can recall’, and sunk £5,000 of his own money into a London production. therefore became the first O’Casey play to be premiered outside Dublin when it was first staged at London’s Apollo Theatre in 1929, although in retrospect this may not have been the most strategically brilliant venue in which to perform O’Casey’s new work. Staging at the Apollo inevitably invited comparisons with R.C. Sherriff’s smash-hit First World War drama , which had premiered with Laurence Olivier at the same London playhouse only ten months previously. In his personal collection of press cuttings, O’Casey kept and highlighted the ’s hostile review of , which compared his sprawling, expressionist montage in an unflattering way to the tight and realistic depiction of the trenches that can be found in Sherriff’s work.

Nonetheless, from today’s perspective we can recognise the prescient and forward-looking aspects of O’Casey’s drama. With its crazy shifts of time and tone, refusal of easy religious consolations, and contrasts between the sacrifice of the front and the comforts of the civilian, O’Casey’s play anticipates the celebrated theatrical style of Theatre Workshop’s (1963). In his clear-eyed focus on the destructive futility of the conflict, O’Casey was also predicting the political viewpoint of that play and of (1989), a view point that continues to provoke bewilderment and anger among British politicians and journalists in our own day.

Meanwhile, in the late 1920s, those who ran the Abbey Theatre very quickly realised that they had made a mistake with . Soon after the rejection letter had been sent to O’Casey, one of the Abbey board members had broken ranks and told the press that ‘I should like to see it on the stage’. Lady Gregory then travelled to watch the London production, and noted sadly in her diary that the Abbey really should have produced the drama. Within the next decade, even a repentant Yeats had realised the merits of O’Casey’s text, and asked for permission to stage it at the Abbey, where it was produced in 1935. The Abbey Theatre and O’Casey were both damaged by the brouhaha over the rejection, but, to this day, the play itself remains a most perceptive Irish account of the poetry and the pity of the First World War.