Archive News
Parts are greater than the whole in DruidÕs ‘Silver Tassie’
Date Published: {J}
Review by Judy Murphy
Druid Theatre’s much-anticipated production of Sean O’Casey’s anti-war play, The Silver Tassie, at the Town Hall Theatre is massive in scale and attention to detail. So massive, in fact, that sometimes the mechanics interfere with the action of the play and the dynamic between the characters.
That’s not a problem initially when the action opens in the living/bedroom of a Dublin tenement as young footballing hero, Harry Heegan (Aaron Monaghan) and his neighbour Teddy Foran (Liam Carney) are set to return to the Great War. They have been on leave, during which time Harry has led his soccer team to glory in winning the silver tassie of the title. The team has won the cup for the fourth time, so it becomes theirs to keep and it will feature again at the end of the play when it comes to symbolise all that Harry has lost in the war.
There’s a lot going on in that first act. The comic element comes thick and fast from Harry’s father Sylvester (Éamon Morrissey) and Simon (John Olohan), a bowler hatted duo who are reminiscent of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Meanwhile Derbhle Crotty as Mrs Foran, is dying to get her husband back to the war so she can do ‘what I likes’.
Susan Monican (Clare Dunne), who is in love with Harry, is trying to convert all around her to a brand of God-fearing Christianity in a blackly comic sort of way. The young, handsome Harry, however, is besotted with Jessie (Aoife Duffin) and is in no rush to return to the Front, despite his mother’s (Ruth Hegarty) best efforts to shoo him out the door.
Here, the impressive set and lighting serve as a backdrop to the action. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of Act Two where a giant tank, complete with moving gun, dominates the stage. As a concept, it might have merit, but in real terms, you are left wondering how the actors can actually move in these cramped surroundings. And then there’s the music. Song is important in O’Casey’s work, but here genuine moments of pathos were diminished by the intrusive music and singing. The presence of a shiny silver flute amid the debris of France’s battlefields was incongruous to say the least.
The religious symbolism which runs throughout The Silver Tassie is to the fore in this act and continues in Act 3, with a crucifix dominating the ward of the hospital where a paralysed Harry is being treated. He shares the ward – inexplicably – with the Sylvester and Simon, in their nightshirts and still with their bowler hats on, who are still bantering merrily. The men’s names have been replaced by numbers, and their nurse is the once god-fearing Susan, who has become quite the dominatrix.
But, while the play picks up here, it struggles to re-engage with the audience after the flat, over-long second act an never really recovers its energy, despite the best efforts of the actors, several of whom had multiple roles.
The silver tassie re-emerges in the final act, when Harry rages at the world and his former love Jessie for all he has lost. The football club is the venue for a dance in which the blind and crippled are excluded from the world of the able-bodied and where life goes on, leaving them behind.
The staging here is superb, with choreographed releasing of balloons and clever use of lighting and shadow, as the blind Mr Foran leads Harry away from the party.
The Silver Tassie, with its mix of realism and expressionism, is a challenging play to stage and is certainly not O’Casey’s greatest work, but it does have a real pathos. Druid’s production, by including much that was unnecessary and by focusing so much on the comic element, has sacrificed much of that to present a Silver Tassie where the parts are greater than the whole.
The Silver Tassie runs in the Town Hall Theatre until September 7 with tickets costing €25/€18 concession.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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