The Silver Tassie by Sean O'Casey

First published: 1928

First produced: 1929, at the Apollo Theatre, London

Type of plot: Tragicomedy; war

Time of work: World War I

Locale: Dublin, Ireland, and the front lines in France

Principal Characters:

• Harry Heegan, a star player for the Avondale Football Club, a young working man recently inducted into the British Army
• Jessica “Jessie” Taite, a charming flirt whom Harry loves
• Susie Monican, a pretty girl in love with Harry but intensely devoted to evangelical Christianity
• Mrs. Foran, a gossip and busybody
• Teddy Foran, her husband, an abrasive drunkard
• The Croucher, an unidentified soldier, leader of a chorus of soldiers

The Play

The Silver Tassie unfolds in four relatively long acts. Act 1 opens in the home of the Heegans; as Mrs. Heegan gets Harry’s clothes ready for his return to his army unit, Mr. Heegan and his friend exchange stories about Harry’s strength and athletic prowess. Meanwhile, Susie Monican, a friend of the family and a young woman with a crush on Harry, attempts to get attention by uttering constant dour predictions and prophecies of doom prompted by her narrow fundamentalist piety. This domestic scene is disturbed by noise from the flat upstairs, where the Forans are having another row. Mrs. Foran comes in hastily to hide from her drunken husband, Teddy, who follows shortly, clearly inebriated and looking for his wife and Mr. Heegan—both of whom have hidden under the bed. General disapproval and Mrs. Foran’s scolding force Teddy to leave, but he can be heard smashing furniture and dishes above.

The mood changes when cheers and concertina music can be heard, and Harry enters with his arms around his favorite girlfriend, Jessica Taite. They bring the silver trophy cup, or silver tassie, that the Avondale Football Club has won by Harry’s decisive goal, the “odd goal in five.” While Harry exults in his victory and the strength of his youth, Jessie, a beautiful girl of twenty-two who is attracted to winners, and Barney, a young man who admires Harry’s superior strength and skill, join Harry in drinking wine from the silver cup, which Harry calls a “sign of youth, sign of strength, sign of victory.” Even Susie abandons her preaching and quoting of scripture to put her arm around Harry and flirt with him, though she has just bitterly repulsed an advance from Barney. Under Mrs. Heegan’s constant urging, Harry gathers up his belongings, and he, Barney, and Teddy Foran depart to catch the boat that will take them back to their army unit. At their departure, Mrs. Heegan breathes a sigh of relief.

Act 2 shifts to a frontline combat zone in France, where a ravaged monastery has been converted into a makeshift Red Cross station. Barney is the only main character to appear, although one of the anonymous soldiers seems to be Teddy. Inside the station, unnamed soldiers await an uncertain fate while recuperating from trauma, wounds, and exhaustion. They are led in various laments and litanies by a wounded soldier called simply The Croucher, who begins the scene with a lamentation in biblical cadences about the surrealist landscape. In a series of poetic complaints, the soldiers voice their disillusionment with the war and express their sense of the futility of fighting. A visiting civilian dignitary arrives and utters absurd clichés about the significance of war. Finding Barney under restraint for the crime of stealing a chicken, the civilian voices his approval of such discipline. The civilian dignitary disappears for a while into a dugout, and a “staff-wallah” appears. This officer from headquarters arrives full of pomp and circumstance, and he tries to raise the men’s morale while enforcing petty regulations to the very letter of the law. His efforts are unsuccessful. Receiving warning that an enemy attack is imminent, a corporal leads the soldiers in a series of rhymed chants, deifying the gun as one of the two gods in whom the men trust (the other being the Creator). While making their ritualistic prayers to the steel god, the men seem to gain renewed strength. An assault begins.

Act 3 takes place in a hospital ward an indefinite time later. Harry’s father lies in a bed, receiving a visit from his friend. They comment on the change in Susie Monican, who, as a nurse, now wears rather daring clothes and relishes her role as a person of responsibility. Moreover, her evangelical piety has been abandoned; she now behaves in a decidedly secular manner and carries on a flirtation with Surgeon Maxwell. Among the other patients are Teddy Foran, who has been blinded, and Harry, who, having been shot in his spine and paralyzed from the waist down, enters in a wheelchair. Harry expresses hope that an operation tomorrow will help him, although Surgeon Maxwell expresses skepticism when Harry is out of earshot. Harry also worries because Jessie has not come to visit him, and he expresses bitterness and self-pity, which is heightened when he learns that his friend Barney will receive the Victoria Cross for removing him from danger.

From his mother and Mrs. Foran, who have come to visit, Harry learns that Jessie is on the hospital grounds with Barney but that she is clearly unwilling to come to visit him. Harry’s agitation forces Susie to send the visitors away. Barney enters awkwardly to deliver flowers and a ukelele from Jessie, but her absence is painfully conspicuous. Barney makes a quick exit; he is obviously aiding Jessie in her betrayal. Harry cries out in despair.

Act 4 opens some weeks later at the dance hall of the Avondale Football Club, where a dance is being held to celebrate the retiring of the Silver Tassie because the Avondale team has won it three times, twice with Harry’s help. Barney and Jessie have come together and are now obviously constant companions, but in their conversation they complain of Harry’s constant shadowing of their movements. Mrs. Heegan and Mr. Foran express concern that Harry has come, but Mrs. Heegan says that Harry wants to stay until the ceremony over the cup: He wants to drink from the Silver Tassie since he did so much to win it. Harry appears, but is seen to be rather drawn and faint when he enters in a wheelchair pushed by Susie. Surgeon Maxwell decides that Harry should leave as soon as he drinks from the cup. Harry is joined by Teddy Foran, now blind, and they engage in a litany of lament about their losses.

Susie brings Harry his ukelele, and he plays the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” drinks some wine from the cup, and wheels himself outside into the garden dispiritedly. Barney and Jessie enter; one strap of her gown is broken. Despite her protests, he takes advantage of their concealment behind the curtains of an alcove to embrace her and break the other strap, allowing her gown to collapse to her waist. Harry appears and makes a scene, denouncing Barney for his disloyalty and Jessie for her fickleness. He then tells Barney to go on and make love to Jessie there at the club as he himself had done before his wound. Jessie denies losing her virginity to Harry, although not very convincingly. Surgeon Maxwell and the others arrive to break up the quarrel, which has turned ugly with Barney attacking Harry and beating him.

Coming to his senses, Harry realizes that his wound has removed him irrevocably from the normal course of life, and he calls on Teddy to join him on a bitter journey homeward, for “what’s in front we’ll face like men!” Susie pronounces the judgment of the others: Life must go on, and Harry must accept his tragic fate.

Dramatic Devices

Sean O’Casey’s major break with the realistic tradition, and his chief innovation, is his experimental and poetic portrayal of the battlefront in act 2. This act is largely impressionistic and symbolic in its theatrical design, with a chorus of soldiers uttering their lamentations about the war, a symbolic civilian voicing platitudes about honor, and a stylized backdrop. In its conception and its poetic refrains, the act foreshadows much of the later O’Casey works, especially the visionary transformation of Dublin in act 3 of Red Roses for Me (pb. 1942, pr. 1943). The staging of act 2 is not especially difficult, although it does make demands of a theatrical company with limited personnel and resources. The act is not particularly difficult for an audience to understand or accept. It is curious that Yeats, in rejecting The Silver Tassie for the Abbey Theatre, accused the play of a lack of unity. In large part, it may be suspected that the reason was the diversion of this act from the story of Harry Heegan, yet most sophisticated modern audiences, especially those familiar with the conventions of American musical comedy, would find the act quite easy to accept.

The action of the rest of the play is fairly close to conventional realism, although the action is rather episodic, covering an indefinite period—roughly a year. The use of the festival dance at the Avondale Football Club in the final act adds a particular irony and poignancy to Harry’s tragedy. A man in a wheelchair cannot join in the victory dance, or, symbolically, in the dance of life. Barney’s sexual aggressiveness at the dance may seem to be somewhat unrealistic. Certainly a more experienced seducer would wait until Jessie was in a more private situation before breaking the second strap of her gown, but Barney is not necessarily experienced, and he is, perhaps, as excited by his betrayal of Harry as he is by Jessie’s charms. Barney’s assault on Jessie’s gown is a bold theatrical stroke for the dramatist, and it helps create a sympathetic context for Harry’s savage denunciation of the pair.

Critical Context

The Silver Tassie is a pivotal work in Sean O’Casey’s career; it provoked the bitter quarrel with Yeats which led to O’Casey’s decisive break with the Abbey Theatre. The play also clearly marks the direction that O’Casey’s subsequent work was to take, with its attempt to go beyond realism by venturing into the stylized poetic expressionism of the second act. Although there are those who continue to insist that some of Yeats’s criticisms were accurate, and that O’Casey’s stubborn championing of the play was a mistake, which led to an unwise exile in England, the majority opinion of O’Casey scholars seems to be that The Silver Tassie is a solid and powerful work. Indeed, the play is only one of many antiwar novels and plays that emerged in print in the late 1920’s, and it should be viewed in the context of the decade’s disillusionment with war and patriotism. The bitter and ironic tone of the work is comparable to that found in Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1928), and much of the modernist poetry of the time, especially that by Graves, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings.

As for the negative views of O’Casey’s later career, which often begin with disparagement of The Silver Tassie, O’Casey’s sympathetic critics reply that his dramatic ambitions and vision were moving beyond the realism of his early masterpieces. In his later work, O’Casey attempts to become a spokesman for the visionary and romantic imagination and to comment on themes of world significance. In other words, he moved beyond the somewhat provincial concerns to Irish poverty and Irish nationalism, though this growth did not please those who wanted him to remain a realistic dramatist, fusing Ibsenist dramaturgy with Dickensian humor.

The problem of evaluating The Silver Tassie as a work of art remains; there are still differences of opinion. While the antiwar theme is handled effectively, for example, it may be contended that O’Casey’s play tends to become obsessively didactic. Moreover, the controversial second act may seem too strident and obvious, now that the shock impact of the antiwar rhetoric has worn off.

More important than these considerations, the major problem of the play for some may be the limited nature of the protagonist, Harry Heegan. Harry is not a very reflective hero before being wounded: As the author comments, he has gone to war “as unthinkingly as he would go to the polling booth.” O’Casey apparently created Heegan as a symbol of the working-class victims of all nations, who were duped and manipulated by nationalist rhetoric and cynical political leaders, but by giving Harry so little self-awareness, the author ran the risk of developing a character who could gain only a limited degree of sympathy.

After Harry sustains his tragic wound, he does grow in moral stature and self-consciousness, but the increase is not extraordinary. Perhaps it is somewhat difficult for sophisticated audiences to identify with a hero whose chief distinction has been his athletic ability. At any rate, Harry’s limited vision and moral awareness prevent him from becoming an authentic tragic hero. Unlike O’Casey’s later working-class hero, Ayamonn Breydon in Red Roses for Me, Harry is not an original thinker, nor is he very poetic, except at second hand. The Silver Tassie is a harsh and durable play, but it remains a tragicomedy, rather than the tragic masterpiece some of O’Casey’s most ardent admirers claim it to be.

Sources for Further Study

Hogan, Robert T., and Richard Burnham. The Years of O’Casey, 1921-1926: A Documentary History. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

Krause, David. Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work. New York: Macmillan, 1960.

Malone, Maureen. The Plays of Sean O’Casey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Mikhail, E. H. O’Casey and His Critics: An Annotated Bibliography. Landham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1985.

Mitchell, Jack. The Essential O’Casey: A Study of the Twelve Major Plays of Sean O’Casey. New York: International, 1980.

O’Riordan, John. A Guide to O’Casey’s Plays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Rollins, Ronald Gene. Sean O’Casey’s Drama: Verisimilitude and Vision. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981.

Schrank, Bernice W. Sean O’Casey: A Research and Production Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.