There was an air of barely suppressed excitement at the Gaiety Theatre last Saturday, when Opera Ireland opened its season with The Silver Tassie. Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera, which is adapted from Sean O'Casey's great anti-war play, arrived in Dublin already garlanded with honours from its production in London last year by the English National Opera.
As Michael Dervan remarked in his re view in this newspaper earlier this week, such prizes do not always make for groundbreaking works of art. But in this case it has meant that Amanda Holden, who wrote the libretto, has been faithful to the spirit and the text of the play. Her version of The Silver Tassie remains firmly rooted in the Dublin tenements of O'Casey's youth and shares his anger at the futility of war, the waste of young lives and hopes destroyed by the awful lure of violence.
This loyalty to O'Casey's vision and its resonances for today is endorsed by the composer, Mark-Anthony Turnage. In an interview for the original production of the The Silver Tasie by the English National Opera, reprinted in Opera Ireland's programme, the composer says: "The fundamental thing I was concerned with was the Irishness of the play. Every line is within that Irish tradition."
Turnage tells of being invited to Derry by Shivaun O'Casey (the playwright's daughter) to talk about his opera in progress. "It was during one of the ceasefires and I was very aware of Irish politics. I think, living now, to ignore the Irishness of it would be almost obscene."
For some of us in the audience on Saturday night this wonderfully confident production seemed like an act of homage, reparation even, to O'Casey. Most of those involved in it are Irish, sensitive not only to the play's troubled history but to its profound relevance for our own times.
It was the Abbey's rejection of The Silver Tassie in 1928 which drove O'Casey into exile and hardened his feelings against Ireland. It was not until 1964, the year he died, that he finally allowed the Abbey to stage Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. Most critics believe that his work never recovered its former power after the episode.
THE reason usually given for the Abbey's decision to reject the play is that Yeats mistrusted O'Casey's passionate pacifism and doubted he understood the experience of war. But he must also have wondered, after the riots that greeted The Plough and the Stars in 1926, how an Abbey audience would react to another play excoriating violence, this time played out by Irishmen fighting for the British crown in the first World War.
There is an electrifying moment in the second act of Patrick Mason's production. Ironically, this is the section of the play which is often judged too difficult to stage, because it departs so radically from the realism of the rest of the writing. To emphasise its "operatic" quality, O'Casey directed that the actors - soldiers waiting wearily at the front - should chant their lines like Gregorian plainsong.
Mason has taken full advantage of the challenge to heighten the dramatic atmosphere. As the soldiers turn their backs to the audience and face into the rattle of the enemy's guns, a shower of poppy red petals flutters down on to the stage to mark their sacrifice.
It is not so very long since these same red poppies were widely seen as a symbol of political division in both parts of this island. When Mrs McAleese was elected President in 1997, one of the first problematical decisions she had to make was whether to wear a poppy when she attended a Remembrance Day Service on Armistice Day. She judged that it would be inappropriate to wear a symbol associated primarily with a foreign state.
Mrs McAleese, to her enormous credit, has worked hard to break down the kind of prejudice which meant that 35,000 Irish men and women who died in the first World War were virtually written out of history.
She was not alone in recognising that this was an act of collective amnesia which had to be put right if we hoped to build an Ireland generous enough to recognise all traditions.
MANY others played their part in the campaign which led, in 1998, to the opening of the Irish peace park at Messines by the President and Queen Elizabeth. Paddy Harte and Glenn Barr had the original vision and kept it alive through the worst of the violence in Northern Ireland. For David Trimble the ceremony at Messines, where two heads of state joined to remember those who had died, was part of "a new beginning and a positive marker for the future".
For most Irish men and women it was simply another step towards recognising the complexity of our own history, and how deeply intertwined the two traditions have always been. Not everybody shares this view. The North remains, as always, problematical.
Sinn Fein representatives refuse to attend ceremonies for Remembrance Day, arguing that these are exclusively unionist in nature. But they know, too, that attitudes have changed beyond recognition and that it is the politics of peace, to which they have enthusiastically subscribed, which has made this possible.
There will be no return to the days when republicans were prepared to excuse the IRA's bombing of a Remembrance Day service as an attack on a legitimate target.