As The Silver Tassie is revived at the National, Ciarán Hinds, Niamh Cusack and Aidan McArdle reflect on playing O'Casey's characters and the rhythm of his writing

Ciarán Hinds



Hinds played "Captain" Jack Boyle in Juno and the Paycock at the Glasgow Citizens theatre in 1983 and again in 2011 at the Abbey theatre, Dublin and the National Theatre

When O'Casey wrote his Dublin trilogy [The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars], you rarely saw the city's working classes on stage. He put them bang in the centre. His plays showed real life. He came from amongst those people and he didn't try to overdramatise them, just to root them in the reality of the times. Their characters aren't ciphers for something O'Casey wanted to say. They're living, breathing people, for good and for bad.

Juno and the Paycock is about the Irish civil war of 1922-23. It's not quite reportage, but he wrote it in 1924, so there's an immediacy to the play. It's a tragedy, and yet you can't play tragedy, so it's really about people surviving – just – on the edge of poverty.

The play starts out like a soap opera, people going about their daily lives. A man, Jack Boyle, comes back from the bar and lies to his wife, who's just trying to put food on the table. Then they get this extraordinary news that they've come into money. Through it all, O'Casey threads the political situation of the time: as they're celebrating, a young man's funeral passes by outside and, from then on, the whole thing starts to crumble. O'Casey lets these momentous events seep into the fabric of people's lives.

The men in Juno are drunkards, wheedlers and spongers. They're chancers. His plays always give women a great voice – they are always trying to hold things together. Captain Jack's not a nice piece of work at all. You have to learn to enjoy playing him. He's a liar and a braggart, yet he also has a naivety, a child-like belief that he can pull the wool over people's eyes. People see right through him, of course – that's his charm. He and his wife are in their 50s, but O'Casey was skilful enough to make you see that they must have had a wonderful time together when they were younger.

There's a fantastic rhythm to the writing – and, indeed, to the manner in which Dubliners speak. They take a formal English sentence and dance it around a bit. His characters use this highfalutin verbosity, and our job as actors is to sing it and keep it real.

A couple of years ago, I was in Bucharest, where I saw this poster in Romanian: Something Something Something by Seán O'Casey. His place in the Irish canon is a given, but he's a completely European writer. O'Casey spoke about people in everyday situations but with that epic quality of some deeper truth. [His plays] have messages about socialism, about people and the future, who we are and what we should do, all mixed with the tragedy of real life.

'His characters love language' … actor Niamh Cusack on Seán O'Casey. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Niamh Cusack



Cusak played Nora Clitheroe in The Plough and the Stars at the Young Vic in 1991

O'Casey is woven into the Irish consciousness. We've got a number of playwrights that mean a lot to us, but I'd say he's on a par with your Shakespeare. His plays are a wry celebration of the Irish temperament, while also giving you a rich sense of our history.

My father, Cyril, was an actor, and I vividly remember seeing him in The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey theatre as a young girl. The play is about Dublin people living through the Easter Rising, in 1916, and you get this real sense of people living cheek by jowl in those tenement blocks – the irritation, the camaraderie, the gossip, the petty resentments – all set against this huge, emotional moment in Irish history.

I hadn't done an O'Casey play before The Plough and the Stars, which Sam Mendes directed for the Young Vic. In fact, I hadn't done much Irish drama at all. It was an amazing company, and there was this sense of history in the room. My father had played Fluther and the Covey. Dearbhla Molloy and Judi Dench had worked together on Trevor Nunn's Juno and the Paycock, so everyone knew each other. There's a sense – and Russian actors have this with Chekhov – of these plays and these roles being handed down from one generation to another.

What you realise very quickly is that O'Casey's characters aren't caricatures. They're real people, rounded and complete. Everyone's flawed, but they can be very, very funny. It gives them this real humanity. They all have their achilles heels, as well as their small moments of heroism. That's what I loved about playing Nora: she's a flawed heroine – a little snobbish, very upwardly mobile, but she's getting by the best she can.

I was struck by the language, too. His characters love language. They love expressing themselves, even when they don't quite grasp what they're saying. There's a great sequence where the Covey quotes from this communist manifesto and, though he gets it wrong, he just loves the sound of it; the ideas, too, but mostly just speaking it out loud.

But it's also exquisitely structured. Basically, the play reaches this extraordinary, awful climax – one tragedy after another – and it can do that because he's set up the ordinary lives and the political background of the play with such a lightness of touch that, when the two come together, it doesn't jar at all. In fact, like the very best tragedy, it seems inevitable.

O'Casey combined high comedy and deep tragedy … Aidan McArdle, right, with Patrick Brennan and Marion O'Dwyer in The Shadow of a Gunman in 2004. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Aidan McArdle



McArdle played Donal Davoren in The Shadow of a Gunman at the Tricycle theatre in 2004. He is currently appearing as Sylvester Heegan in The Silver Tassie at the National Theatre

The Shadow of a Gunman is about two guys, one of them a writer, the other his friend, in Dublin during the Irish war of independence. The writer, Donal, is mistaken for an IRA man, and the play hones in on the massive gap between someone's idealistic principles and, when push comes to shove, their self-preservation. He allows his characters to talk themselves into a corner, then undercuts their bombast by forcing them into that situation. You end up with this combination of high comedy and very, very deep tragedy.

When you're playing O'Casey, the social history can be a bit of a blind alley. Yes, Dublin was one of the poorest cities in Europe at the time. Life in the tenements was awful and people were very hard up. But he just takes it for granted that we know that; his characters don't bitch about it. They barely talk about poverty at all. They just accept that life and get on with living it. There's no self-pity. People are just trying to survive and, to do so, they only see things from their own perspective. Michael Frayn has a saying: "A good play is a play in which every character is right." That's why it's such a strong portrait of a particular world with such huge social resonance.

But that naturalism is balanced with this highfalutin, poetic language – borderline Shakespeare or Synge. You've got to make the two live together, so that flowery, purple language doesn't sound flowery and purple, it just sounds like how people talk.

It's the same with the scale of events. He'll build up to this awful moment and then undercut it with someone who just doesn't give a shit. Someone will have just had a huge void ripped out of them and then someone else will come out with something utterly inconsequential. You've got to be careful to avoid panto-style set pieces, but if you play it too naturalistically you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

That's especially true with The Silver Tassie, because it starts off like another of the famous naturalistic Dublin trilogy plays, then, from nowhere, he turns it into a verse piece to show us the western front. Then, even though he returns to realism for the last two acts, they're irrevocably altered. There's no going back. It's a radically different world. Everyone thinks they've got the measure of O'Casey, but this is him showing his chops. Even now, he's a much finer playwright than we might give him credit for.

I started reading O'Casey's autobiography, and I was surprised he'd written so much. He kept writing into the early 1950s and 60s. We all know the Dublin trilogy, of course, and maybe The Silver Tassie, but there's loads I'd never heard of. The time is right for an O'Casey festival, showcasing some of the lesser known stuff and his development into different styles. It's incredible that so many of his plays are out of print.

• The Silver Tassie runs until 3 July. Box office: 020-7452-3000. Venue: National Theatre, London.

• O'Casey: Beyond Dublin, a Platform event at the National Theatre exploring O'Casey's later work, takes place at 10.30am on 17 May