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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Minds at War: Series 3

The Essay: Minds at War: Series 3: Episode 5: Minds at War: Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie

Episode 5

Episode 5: Minds at War: Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie

Minds at War: Series 3

Minds at War: Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie

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Playwright and academic Elizabeth Kuti explores Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie.

Minds at War: Exploring how Irish artists were influenced by the First World War. 5/5. Playwright and academic Elizabeth Kuti explores Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie.

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art. 

To mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, this series of Minds at War explores how Irish artists were influenced by the First World War.


5. Playwright and academic Elizabeth Kuti explores Sean O'Casey's "The Silver Tassie"

Sean O' Casey's breakthrough came when his play "The Shadow of a Gunman" was accepted by W.B. Yeats at the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, and received a rapturous response from audiences and critics in 1923. A year later, his subsequent play, "Juno and the Paycock" got an even more enthusiastic reception and in 1926 "The Plough and the Stars" was also highly praised.

But when O'Casey showed "The Silver Tassie" to Yeats, the reaction was furious. Yeats claimed that O''Casey had no direct experience of, or interest in the war. O'Casey hit back, saying that, even though he had not been on the battlefield, he had seen for himself the horrific after-effects of the conflict. In The Silver Tassie, he chose a hero, Harry, who begins the play as a sporting hero and, after serving as a soldier, ends up in a wheelchair, watching his sweetheart betray him with another man.

Elizabeth Kuti explores how O'Casey weaves the themes of war, life, death, heroism and victimhood into the play and also analyses the way in which it acted as a precursor for subsequent war drama. 

Producer: Emma Kingsley.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

How great artists and thinkers responded to World War I in individual works of art

Series exploring how great artists and thinkers responded to World War I in individual works of art

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Episode 5: Minds at War: Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie

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