The Silver Tassie, National Theatre

2014-2018 marks four years of honouring the First World War across the world. The London arts scene is set to see an influx of the poetry, artwork, literature and plays that the conflict produced, and which in great part constitute our national best.  Where would we be, after all, without works such as Journey’s End and Oh! What a Lovely War (on at the Theatre Royal Stratford East until 15 March)? But all eyes are on our biggest cultural institutions in terms of setting the tone, and the National Theatre is doing so promisingly with its new April run of The Silver Tassie, by Irish playwright Sean O’Casey.

It’s a tragicomic play that was written fewer than ten years after the end of the war, and quickly became a national sensation. It tells the story of Harry Heegan, a young football player who, following an heroic, match-winning goal at one of his home team’s final matches before the war, is awarded a coveted silver trophy named in honour of the Robert Burns poem ‘My Bonie Mary’: " O bring to me a pint of wine and fill it in a silver tassie ." 

Hot on the heels of this triumph Harry takes up his kit bag and ups sticks for the trenches, whereupon he is debilitatingly and life-changingly injured. The four-act play is the portrait of Harry’s descent from a local hero filled with the lifeblood of youth to an angry and irredeemably damaged old man. In so doing, he comes to represent all soldiers who survived the war but were never free of it. 

Howard Davies, one of the National’s Associate Directors, takes the helm on The Silver Tassie. As his recent work on The Last of the Haussmans with Julie Walters, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and another Irish classic Juno and the Paycock testifies, he’s an adept orchestrator of that most nuanced of genres, the tragicomedy. 

One of our inside sources in the cast noted: “The play is quite musical in a way as O’Casey wrote chants and Irish songs into the script - it’s very poetic in its use of music.” Little wonder, then, that Davies is collaborating on this front with the Academy Award winning composer Stephen Warbeck, who has written music for virtuoso productions including Jerusalem and Mojo in the West End and the RSC’s Wolf Hall.

Rehearsals have been extended from the usual 6 to 7 weeks, which in itself suggests some epic ideas on Howard Davies’ part. They are no doubt in safe hands with a cast as full of shining talent as this. Aidan McArdle and Aoife McMahon (both staples of the Royal Shakespeare Company) star alongside Deirdre Mullins - who was the perfect Rosalind in the Globe’s As You Like It in 2012. Jordan Mifsúd is on our ones-to-watch list: a rising star whose work with real life soldiers in Our Ajax and The Two Worlds of Charlie F will undoubtedly come in useful.