Review: The Silver Tassie @NationalTheatre

The (only) good thing about the football thingy going on at the moment is that it leads to cheap theatre tickets. This is a fascinating work but I’m glad I didn’t pay full price. The acting and direction are superb – the trouble is the play. Three acts are naturalistic, with all the clichés of Irish drama, such as alcohol, religion, domestic abuse, etc. There is even one scene that could have come straight out of a Graham Lineham comedy as two men panic over a ringing telephone, unsure how to cope with it. The problem is act 2 which is half sung, half spoken verse, attempting to show the horror of the first world war, plus the usual caricature of the senior officer as an upper class prat, rather like Blackadder Goes Forth, but I felt it was neither as funny nor as moving. Still, it’s an important play and I’m glad I’ve seen it. I was also quite glad to have seen a captioned performance as some of the Irish accents were very strong.

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