The Silver Tassie (play) play's study of Harry’s loss of many of his life’s hopes during and after the war, marks it as unusual. In 1928, W. B. Yeats rejected the play for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It premièred at the Apollo Theatre in the West End of London on 11 October 1929. It was directed by Raymond Massey and starred Charles Laughton and Barry Fitzgerald. The set design for act two was by Augustus John. It ran for twenty-six performances. George Bernard Shaw and Lady Gregory were both great admirers of the production. Its Irish première was on 12 August 1935 at
George Bernard Shaw the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions". As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on analysing new works, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for "The Saturday Review",