Bold? Deep? No, it's more Oedipus Schmedipus

CULTURE SHOCK:SEÁN O'CASEY'S The Silver Tassieis arguably Ireland's first European play. This is not to say that there were not huge European influences on previous Irish plays – Molière on Sheridan, for example, or Ibsen on Shaw, or Wagner on Yeats. What's different about The Silver Tassie,though, is that the experience it enacts is an entirely typical European experience. Change the accents and there is hardly a line in Tassiethat could not just as easily be spoken by German or Italian or French characters. The story could unfold in exactly the same way anywhere that had an urban working-class community whose young men served in the first World War.

I'm not sure that there is a single other non-abstract Irish narrative of which this could be said. Joyce's Ulysses, for example, is undoubtedly a great European novel, but no one would ever argue that its location is irrelevant. And what makes this uniqueness important is that The Silver Tassiewas, notoriously, rejected by the Abbey. There were all sorts of reasons for this, but the overarching one was the idea that "Irish" drama (and by extension Irish art in general) had to be Irish first, and universal only by extension. This was, of course, the basic motive force of the Irish renaissance. As he was breaking with that idea, O'Casey's expulsion from the Abbey was perhaps inevitable.

For decades, it has been almost compulsory to see this breach as a tragic one that both destroyed O’Casey and condemned Irish theatre to a stilted parochialism. Neither of these things is broadly untrue. But seeing Garry Hynes’s electrifying Druid production of Tassie in the context of Dublin Theatre Festival forces some pause for thought. In the long run it is not at all obvious that Irish theatre suffered from not being “European” enough.

Thirty years ago, when Polish stage companies such as Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre came to Dublin for the festival, it was rather obvious that they were wildly more interesting than almost anything that was going on here. They were at the far end of a process that O’Casey was beginning in Tassie, replacing naturalism with expressionism, breaking with 19th-century ideas of character, narrative and “reality”.

And yet this process of thinking about the form of theatre had clearly not led to work that was self-indulgent or disengaged from the larger political world. Created as it was under communism, how could it be? You could look at this work and see that it was both formally adventurous and politically edgy, both poetic and public. And you think: if only . . . If only Irish theatre had followed on from what O’Casey was trying to do, it could now be like this too.

Thirty years on, however, you go to a Polish production, such as Grzegorz Jarzyna's T.E.O.R.A.M.A.T., a stage version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema, and you think: on the other hand it could have been like this. The show is quite beautifully designed and lit, making stunning use of the great depth of space available in the O'Reilly Theatre. The movement of the actors in this space is choreographed with a fabulous technical facility. The actors themselves have a striking presence. And the whole thing is horribly vapid. There would be more blood in an overcooked sausage.

The question it raises is this: where do you go when you’ve cut yourself off from old-fashioned notions such as written texts and political realities? You can go into pure abstraction, pure exercises in style. Or you can go where far too much European avant-garde theatre currently goes: into a search for meaning that would not be out of place in a first-year philosophy seminar.

T.E.O.R.A.M.A.T.ends up with a weird and often ridiculous mix of Oedipus-Schmedipus Freudianism, Dostoyevskian spiritual angst and anti-capitalist rhetorical gestures. The underlying notion – that the bourgeoisie are a shower of repressed swines who couldn't cope with a good shag – is an avant-gardism frozen in time, in this case specifically 1968. It is not a place Irish drama should ever want to end up.

And if Irish theatre hurt both O'Casey and itself when The Silver Tassiewas rejected, at least it still has the capacity to reconnect. Druid's monumental production at the Gaiety would be a noble enterprise if it were no more than an apology for the past and an attempt to reintegrate the play into the Irish repertoire. The good thing is that it's not noble at all.

The problem with Tassiehas always been the effect of its expressionistic second act, with its highly formal visual effects and chanted dialogue, on the other three acts. Its heightened effects make what comes after it seem rather flat and domestic. While the most striking aspect of Hynes's production is undoubtedly the visual power of the second act, its real achievement is in the way it makes this part of the play continuous with what lies on either side of it.

In a sense, Hynes's Tassieis not a play about war at all. It is a play about the way societies develop the capacity not to know about war.

Dramatically, the play’s central character, Harry Heegan, has always seemed a little weak and undeveloped. Hynes suggests, however, that the play’s real protagonist is not Harry but the society in which his story can be absorbed, exploited and ultimately denied.

One of the effects of this is that we see, for the first time in O’Casey, a truly bleak picture of a Dublin working-class community. In his more famous plays there is a sense of the intimacy of that community counterbalancing to some extent the bitterness of its poverty. Here there is no intimacy: the community can’t wait to get Harry on the troop ship that’s waiting for him in the first act and can’t find a place for his broken self in the last. Hynes makes the cruelty and chaos of the war seem merely the ultimate expression of the cruelty and chaos of life at home.

A production like this is possible because Irish theatre still has a connection to both written text and political context. However foolish and cruel Yeats was in turning down The Silver Tassie, his basic idea – that theatre must retain a sense of the particular – is oddly vindicated.