Sean O’Casey described his wonderful play The Silver Tassie, which I review in Weekend today, as a ‘tragi-comedy’. Much of the (very welcome) humour is supplied by the antics of a pair of old boys, Sylvester Heegan and Simon Norton, beautifully portrayed by Aidan McArdle and Stephen Kennedy. In Garry Hynes’s startlingly good production of the play that the Irish company Druid brought to Oxford Playhouse in 2010, the characters wore bowler hats, giving the impression, possibly intended, that they were auditioning, two decades early, for roles in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot. At the National Theatre, headgear is dispensed with.

The joshing, disputational nature of the men’s friendship is established in the opening scene of the play when they disagree about the details of a boxing match in which a policeman had been worsted by Sylvester’s son Harry.

Acting out the climax of the bout in pantomimic style — as seen in the photograph on the right — Sylvester supplies breathless commentary. “There he [the policeman] was staggerin’, beatin’ out blindly, every spark of energy panted out of him, while Harry feinted, dodg’d, sidestepp’d, then suddenly sail’d in an’ put him asleep with . . .”

“A left-handed hook to the jaw!” he continues, while Simon simultaneously offers: “A right-handed hook to the jaw!”

Slowly and deliberately, Sylvester states: “I was at the fight, Simon, an’ I seen him givin’ a left-handed hook to the jaw.”

With equal force, Simon replies: “I was there, to, an’ I saw him down the Bobby with a right-handed hook to the jaw.”

This prompts Sylvester’s response, following further emphatic statements of both men’s position: “It was a close-up, an’ I don’t know who’d know better if it wasn’t the boy’s own father.”

That seeming to have settled the matter, at least as far as Sylvester is concerned, the subject is closed.

Towards the end of the play, with the sporting Harry (Ronan Raftery) now in a wheelchair from injuries received in the trenches, the gloom of the drama is relieved by Sylvester and Simon’s cack-handed attempts to answer a ringing public telephone.

Neither has faced this particular challenge before, and neither has a clue what to do. After hilarious botched efforts to master the instrument, they fall back on the comforting conclusion that it is the person at the other end who has caused the communication breakdown.

Says Simon: “Likely they are not accustomed to it, and it’s a bit difficult if you’re not fully conscious of its manipulation.”

Sylvester adds: “Well, let them study an’ study it then, or abide by the consequences, for we can’t be wastin’ time teachin’ them.”

As I followed this scene from my seat in the Lyttelton Theatre last week, my mind went back 25 years to an occasion when I, too, was baffled by telephone technology.

Still working principally as a news reporter, I was equipped on this day, as ‘Sunday man on’, with the office’s new mobile telephone. At lunchtime, I lugged this object, which had the size and appearance of a walky-talky, into my local pub, the Waterman’s Arms, in Osney.

As one who knew me very well, the landlord Steve Denny felt reasonably confident that I would not have the first idea how to operate the instrument. So, having noted the telephone number engraved on it, he surreptitiously dialled it from behind the bar.

The ringing went unheard by me amid the convivial hubbub (to digress, weren’t pubs more fun when restricted noon till 2pm opening on Sunday brought everyone in at the same time?).

“Chris, I think that’s your phone ringing,” said the mischievous Steve. Then he — and everyone else present — watched the comic spectacle, lasting some minutes, of my proving incapable of rising to the challenge of answering it.