REVIEW: The Silver Tassie, National Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Ronan Raferty as Harry Heegan in The Silver Tassie. Photograph: Tristram Kenton The Silver Tassie

National Theatre

18 May 2014

4 Stars

A small town dance hall. The haze of cigarette smoke suggests a bygone era, as does the clothing, even the beat of the music. A small band powers away in the corner, supporting the local go-to guy for smooth vocals and good looks. Six women dance with their soldier partners. We can tell they are soldiers because they are all in uniform. At first, the women seem happy but as the dance goes on, as the lighting changes, as the couples move forward, it is clear that they are far from happy. For their soldiers are not real, not human; they are shells, shrouds of the former men they were. And the women, the wonderful women, are doing everything they can to keep them buoyant, upright, part of the world. One or two falter, but the women recover them. And the beat goes on.

This immensely powerful and haunting image concludes Howard Davies' astonishingly good revival of Sean O'Casey's neglected play, The Silver Tassie, now playing at the Lyttleton Theatre at the National. But not only is this scene the perfect way to end O'Casey's play, it is also a deft and resonant reminder of what the National Theatre is for and what it can achieve.

The Lyttleton has not exactly been flush with successful productions these past seven years and more often than not plays have been produced there for odd, unfathomable reasons. But Davies has shown with The Silver Tassie quite what the space is for and how the resources and ambition of the National can generate theatrical gold.

Often, the sets in the Lyttleton can reek of money and not much else. Inevitably, they are expensive and expansive; rarely do they properly support or illuminate the text they are designed for. But Vicki Mortimer's set here does not fall into any of those traps.

It is delicious and magnificent. The grim, tawdry but realistic tenement setting in the first Act speaks eloquently of the poverty, the rawness and the uncertainty of the life of the Irish folk who inhabit it. That realism gives way, intriguingly and before the audience's eyes, to an impressionistic representation of the battlefields of World War One - mirroring the change the text undergoes.

Then, it morphs into a half-way position, a hospital setting that is both real and impressionistic, where the worlds of the first two Acts collide. Finally, the hospital gives way, silently, almost forlornly, and we are in an antechamber in a dance hall, a small claustrophobic room where the world dances on in the background.

Everything about the design and the direction here is first-rate. So is the cast.

Ronan Raferty is outstanding as Harry Heegan, the perfect Irish son, the lad who can win The Silver Tassie for his team three years running, the one who is nonchalant about his orders to return to the front, the one who has his heart set on Jessie, the gorgeous statuesque woman whose savings book suggests an income about which he knows nothing, the one who has his whole life ahead of him and parents who adore him. But his legs are shattered in the war and in the final two acts, Raferty paints a pitch-perfect portrait of a broken man, a lost and desperate man, one whose girl deserts him, one who would rather die than keep on going. It's as shattering and real as any depiction of a war veteran one could hope - or want - to see, bookended by two glorious moments with his mother (his final goodbye before he returns to the front and the moment when she shuffles him away from Jessie who, more than the injuries, has wrenched away his ability to function).

The moment when Harry smashes the Silver Tassie could be as cod and as melodramatic as they come - but not here. Raferty's beautiful performance ensures that this Harry is utterly real, utterly believable and astoundingly tragic. This Raferty is a star in the making - no doubt.

Perhaps the most exquisite thing Raferty does is to carefully and almost casually carve out the character of Harry and then completely abandon that performance for Act Two, where he and everyone else play completely unrelated characters - ciphers who represent the awfulness of war. His performance here is, again, deft and rock-solid, but nothing - and everything - to do with his Harry.

Sean O'Casey will be clapping and cheering in heaven.

Of course, Raferty has excellent support. In particular, the wonderful Josie Walker, almost unrecognisable as this prim, stern, Irish matriarch, with more heart and intelligence than anyone else, is sublime in every way.

Her first entrance, when she quells the jocularity of Aidan McArdle's Sylvester and Stephen Kennedy's Simon Norton (fine turns from both) and dims the lights, says more about this remarkable woman than pages of dialogue could. Walker is perfect throughout, but three scenes stand out: her incisive questioning of Jessie's hidden income; the heart-breaking and silent farewell to Harry; and her shattering denunciation of Jessie when her son's spirit has been irreversibly crushed. Mesmerising. Radiant. And she is the centrepiece of the final image, the haunting nightmare of the dancing soldier shells.

Judith Roddy is quite wonderful as the god-fearing god-loving Susie Monican and her scenes in the hospital ward are particularly rewarding. Deirdre Mullins shines as the ghastly Jessie and she makes it rewarding to see her devastated and exposed.

As the strangest couple in Ireland, Aoife McMahon and Aidan Kelly are lusciously good. He, violent and impossibly appalling, then fragile and humbled; she, outrageous and loudly suffering, then lost to drink and shame. Wonderfully rounded performances from gifted actors.

There is not a person to fault in the cast or ensemble. Davies whips the material into as good a shape as it is ever likely to have. The sense of it, the glistening highlights of pain it produces, will linger long.

The play is not a masterpiece. But giving such a work, an important part of the history of Irish theatre, a platform on a modern stage is one of the things the National Theatre absolutely should do. And not just a platform - but a wonderful, juicy, completely theatrical production that transcends the raw material.

The Silver Tassie shows you clearly what the National Theatre, and, particularly, the Lyttleton stage, can do.

Glorious!