The Silver Tassie: a lavish, experimental muddle that slithers into a coma

The Silver Tassie is the major opening at the Lyttelton this spring. Sean O’Casey’s rarely staged play introduces us to a group of Dublin sportsmen, and their womenfolk, as they prepare to volunteer for service on the Western Front. They parade the ‘silver tassie’, a newly won football trophy, mistakenly believing it to presage victory and good fortune. O’Casey’s characterisation is a little perfunctory. The men are boastful studs, quailing dolts, blarneying drunks or violent despots. The women aren’t much better: a weeping mum, a caustic shrew, a battered martyr, a snooty beauty. It may sound colourful but the storyline develops at the pace of tree rings. And there are two lairy clowns on stage who aren’t quite as funny as they think they are.

To compensate for the script’s languid heartbeat, the director Howard Davies and his designer Vicki Mortimer indulge in a visual extravaganza. When the action shifts to France, we’re treated to an astonishing transformation as the Dublin townhouse becomes the high altar of a bombed-out church where the Irish squaddies and their British officers are sheltering from German artillery.