The Silver Tassie: A Letter (1928)

Abstract

My dear Casey & I had looked forward with great hope and excitement to reading your play, and not merely because of my admiration for your work, for I bore in mind that the Abbey owed its recent prosperity to you. If you had not brought us your plays just at that moment I doubt if it would now exist. I read the first act with admiration, I thought it was the best first act you had written, and told a friend that you had surpassed yourself. The next night I read the second and third acts, and tonight I have read the fourth. I am sad and discouraged; you have no subject. You were interested in the Irish Civil War, and at every moment of those plays wrote out of your own amusement with life or your sense of its tragedy; you were excited, and we all caught your excitement; you were exasperated almost beyond endurance by what you had seen or heard, as a man is by what happens under his window, and you moved us as Swift moved his contemporaries.

Sean O’Casey, Esq. 82 Merrion Square 20 April 1928

This letter was sent by O’Casey to the Observer, which published it, together with part of O’Casey’s reply, in its issue of 3 June 1928; it was reprinted (with the comments of the other Abbey Theatre directors and O’Casey’s replies) in the Irish Statesman for 9 June, and in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. A. Wade (1954) pp. 740–2. The Silver Tassie was first produced at the Apollo Theatre, London, on 11 October 1929.