The Silver Tassie: The Post-World-War-I Legacy

The Silver Tassie: The Post-World-War-I Legacy RONALD G. ROLLINS AND LLEWELLYN RABBY Things raj) apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, . . . IN THE FINAL MONTHS and in the yeafS following World War !, that extended nightmare that shattered an established hierarchical social order that had provided stability and spiritual serenity for centuries of European men, a new mood of bewilderment, despair, and cynical alienation tormented millions of disenchanted people in the western world. And as is so often the case, it was the artists, especially the playwrights, who first gave voice to this new cry of hopelessness, frustration, and fear. Beginning with the plays of the German Expressionists , 1912-1916, a new generation of post-war playwrights exerted themselves to assess the full impact of the old order upon those who were left behind to contemplate the ruins and to lament the loss of friends and cherished values. Repeatedly these playwrights recoiled in anger and anguish from the new lines of force in an historical process that was separating man from ancient patterns of life that had been passed on from father to son, that was regimenting man almost out of existence, and that was driving God from His heaven. Although geographically removed from this post-World-War-! vortex of shrill polemics and relentless technical experimentation, Sean O'Casey was very much a marching member of this new cadre of avant-garde playwrights. His isolated country, with its established 125 126 RONALD G. ROLLINS and LLEWELLYN RABBY Abbey Theatre and the Dublin Drama League, set up in 1918 to stage foreign plays, had been alerted to the manifold possibilities of this new, non-naturalistic drama with the production in Dublin in the 1920's of the plays of Pirandello, Strindberg, Benavente, Andreyev, Lenormand, Toller, Kaiser, and O'Neill.' Here were exciting examples of the new drama that fused angular and grotesque scenic tableaux, chant and ritualized movement, song, mask, dance, intensified symbolic gesture, and emblematic figures into an often musical and vivid dramatic form that would externalize man's hidden world of thought and impulse that had been activated by powerful forces that threatened to cripple or erase him. Recording the fanatical polemics and the hedonistic frivolity of those in different states of shock after World War I, these nonrepresentational plays frequently fused or juxtaposed remnants of classical and Christian myths, myths that enabled the dramatist to measure the fragmenting present against an apparently stable past and to impose a ritualistic sequence upon the siluation being exploited. Hence, these dramas of distortion, emerging out of the playwrights' despairing reservations about individual man's ability to alter Collective History, often manifested both a linear, cause-and-effect relationship , and an epiphanic dimension, a dimension accented by recurring symbols and by ritualistic, ballet-like movements specifically intended to objectify these crucial, intense moments of psychic turbulence which threatened modem man repeatedly experienced.' O'Casey's The Silver Tassie (1929) is transparently a play belonging to this large category of post-World-War-I-Expressionistic plays, a ritualistic parable of calculated ironic contrasts in setting, dress, dialogue , and lighting, and a protest play designed to bring the horrible realities of war- the pandemonium and pain of the battlefield- back from the trenches to the hospitals, homes, and athletic clubs of a complacent and often mercenary society. A drama with geometrical configurations, The Silver Tassie is, in part, then, a work that turns inward upon itself, a self-conscious, subtle masterpiece that invites the reader-observer to discover the complex network of interlocking and overlapping patterns that constitute its design. O'Casey explains the objective of his play with ceremonial patterns in a letter to this writer: [ wished to show the face & unveil the soul of war. [ wanted a war play without noise; without the interruptions of gunfire. content to show its results, as in the chant of the wounded and the maiming of Harry; to show it in its main spiritual phases; its minor impulses and its actual horror of destroying the golden bodies of the young; & of the Church's damned approval in the sardonic hymn to the gun; as true today as it was then...