The Silver Tassie

Garrett Lombard stars in WWI drama “The Silver Tassie.”A Lincoln subsequently Center Festival presentation of the Druid Theater Company manufacture of a play in 2 functions by Sean O'Casey. Directed by Garry Hynes.Sylvester Heegan - Eamon Morrissey Simon Norton - John Olohan Susie Monican - Claire Dunne Mrs. Foran - Marion O'Dwyer Mrs. Heegan - Ruth Hegarty Teddy Foran - Liam Carney Harry Heegan - Garrett Lombard Jessie Taite - Charlie Murphy Barney Bagnal - Raymond ScannellWhen occasions are tough, the challenging write poetry. And let us face the facts, nobody creates poetry such as the Irish. Sean O'Casey had some fierce items to say in "The Silver Tassie" -- briefly on view only at that summer's Lincoln subsequently Center Festival -- concerning the dehumanizing results of The First World War about the good people of Ireland. But knowing in the Druid Theater's expressionistic staging of the 1929 play, helmed with cruel, uncompromising clearness by Garry Hynes, this excellent playwright put more life blood in to the play's anti-war poems, here freshly set towards the shateringly beautiful music of Elliot Davis. The wailing red-colored walls of Francis O'Connor's bare-bones set reveal much more about the playwright's bloody mood than the odds and ends of scenery representing the docklands tenement district of Dublin where a lot of the drama happens. Starkness from the setting suits the tough simplicity of the harrowing story about Harry Heegan (Garrett Lombard), a strapping local lad on leave in the front, who scores the winning goal inside a football match and claims his rewards: a victor's cup known as the Silver Tassie and also the heart of his childhood sweetheart (Charlie Murphy). Then it is to the war -- superbly represented here with a hulking tank that squats about the stage being an implacable engine of dying -- where Harry and the best mate (Raymond Scannell) are fighting alongside un named soldiers who're falling left and right. This is actually the scene that has to make O'Casey's bloodstream boil when he was writing it (even though it was the playwright's seething contempt for "peaceable" Ireland's political detachment that triggered the historic debate within the play). And this is actually the scene that clearly stirred composer Elliot Davis, whose haunting musical plans of O'Casey's bitter poetry tend to be more psychologically battering than all of the guns of war. Despite the problem of bending our ears to trap this is from the idiomatic language, you can't really resist the energy of the musical cry like: "But wy'r we 'ere, wy'r we 'ere -- that's wot we really wants to know!" In order to close our hearts to some Brechtian "Ode towards the Gun" that claims "We feel in God and that we have confidence in thee." This really is verse that are awesome. O'Casey strongly played around with with a number of theatrical styles to share the madness of war and Ireland's childish inclination to laugh when confronted with its disasters. Within the same bruising hospital scene by which we learn that Harry is paralyzed for existence, two ward patients (hilariously performed by Eamon Morrissey and John Olohan) execute a low-comedy routine that's pure vaudeville. So when Harry returns home inside a motorized wheel chair to locate that his girlfriend has left him for his closest friend, -- and everybody needs him to become a good sport about this -- the tragic scene is performed within the frivolous type of a madcap comedy. Harry's potential to deal with the mindless merriment of Armistice Day festivities and the angry refusal to become pitied was O'Casey's final finger up. Although thesp Lombard provides it with all he's, Harry is not anymore created a character than the rest of the drew-in gamers within this drama. And ultimately, his furious demand to become heard can't match the energy from the last verses from the "Stretcher Bearer's Song": "There is no more to become stated, for if we are dead / We might comprehend it all, all, all."Sets and costumes, Francis O'Connor lighting, Davy Cunningham seem, John Leonard movement, David Bolger with Vanessa Lefrancois composer and music director, Elliot Davis music consultant, Philip Chevron production stage manager, Eamonn Fox. Opened up and examined This summer 26, 2011. Running time: 2 Hrs, 30 MIN.With: Christopher Doyle, Gerard Kelly, Elliot Harper, Adam Welsh, Rose bush Moukarzel. Contact the range newsroom at news@variety.com