The rejection in 1928 of Sean O’Casey’s great anti-war play by W.B.Yeats, artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, led to a rift between O’Casey and the Abbey which was never healed and did irreparable harm to playwright and theatre. The tragic-comedy had its first performance in London in 1929 when it was presented by C B Cochran, directed by Raymond Massey and designed by Augustus John. The 29-year-old miscast Charles Laughton played the football hero.
The transition from Dublin to the battlefields in Flanders is masterly handled in Howard Davies’s revival by designer Vicki Mortimer. The famous expressionistic second act, set in a ruined monastery, is a symbolic treatment of war, a stylization of the soldiers’ suffering; and, in its deathly chanting, parodies the Communion Service. The use of Christian ritual for satirical purposes (and the strong anti-¬religious feeling throughout) caused deep offence in Dublin when the play was eventually performed there in 1935. So did O’Casey’s portrayal of the Irish.
The final scene, which recalls Wilfred Owen’s deeply moving war poem, “Disabled”, has the football hero (Ronan Raftery), now a raging cripple in a wheelchair, attending a local dance and constantly pursuing his best friend who has stolen his former girlfriend. The callousness to his plight and the plight of a blinded soldier, as expressed by the women, still has the power to shock.