What’s your favourite play? That is one question that I find impossible to answer. After forty years as an actor, and hundreds of plays, narrowing the field down to a handful is very difficult. Some plays, masterpieces even, do not ring any bells in the emotions, whereas others, lesser works maybe, evoke a response in the soul of the actor and audience which lives a long time.
A flawed play, like Seán O’Casey’s Silver Tassie, can be made memorable by a brilliant production. The play was initially rejected by the Abbey, which caused an outcry, and when the play was produced a few years later there was another outcry, this time the critics of the Abbey had a go at them for doing the play, they said it had no artistic merit.
I played in a production of the Tassie in the early seventies by the late Hugh Hunt, which cut a notch in my heart.
The timing of O’Casey’s anti-war play was unfortunate. In the 1920’s, Ireland was trying to forget that any Irishman had ever fought in the Great War in the British Army, we were busy re-inventing our history, and bestowing the heroic status only on the men of 1916 and the War of Independence. The fact that tens of thousands had gone off to fight and die on Flanders field for the promise of Home Rule was forgotten. But O’Casey knew that there were heroes aplenty among all the men who fought for Ireland, whatever the field of war. So O’Casey left Ireland when we needed his vigorous, acerbic honesty to stand against the forces of banality. “We need our storytellers” says William Goldman, ”someone’s got to keep us alive through the dangerous night, when the flames are flickering and the wolves howl”.

Clive Geraghty