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
W. B. Yeats ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose "Love Songs of Connacht" was widely admired. In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore began the Irish Literary Theatre to present Irish plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager "à l'anglais"." The group's manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared, "We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted &