Fresh from her acclaimed play Narvik winning last year’s Best New Play Award at the UK Theatre Awards, playwright and songwriter Lizzie Nunnery is to premiere her new play with songs To Have to Shoot Irishmen.
Inspired by the true murder of Irish pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington by a British soldier during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the new play explores fractured national identity and the chaotic legacy of British military intervention.
Directed by Gemma Kerr (Hitting Town, Southwark Playhouse) and produced by Lizzie Nunnery’s Almanac Arts and Claire Bigley, To Have to Shoot Irishmen will open at Omnibus Theatre from the 2-20 October and will then tour until 6 November.
To Have to Shoot Irishmen explores the events around Sheehy Skeffington’s death during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. While his rebel friends were out with guns seizing public buildings, and declaring a free Ireland, Skeffington was walking the streets calling for peace and preventing looting. While crossing a bridge Frank was pulled from the crowd, arrested without charge, held for two days then executed under orders from British soldier, Captain John Bowen Colthurst.
The new play conjures the shattering impact of those events on his wife and feminist activist Hanna, on William the teenage soldier who guarded Frank, and on Vane the rebellious commander who bears the news of Frank’s death to Hanna.
The production will merge fictionalized scenes with historic document, and traditional songs with original music and movement, to create a fluid and absorbing performance that interrogates history to ask vital contemporary questions.
I recently spoke to Lizzie about the play.
Tell us about Almanac Arts, a female-led theatre Company that you now head. How and when did that come about and what inspired you?
It started with a conversation at a house party in Liverpool in 2008 between myself and writer Lindsay Rodden. We were both passionate about theatre and about folk music and had loads of ideas for how to use live music in fun ways on stage. Over a few glasses of wine, we started talking about the simple political power folk music can have: how it tells vital stories directly and inclusively. We wanted to do that through theatre too. We wanted to get the raw excitement of a gig into a theatre space and get the beauty and ambition of theatre into a gig space. So we set about trying, and Almanac Arts was born. We began in 2009 making one-off shows that were primarily folk gigs but included poetry, drama, sculpture, even live drawing! We worked with amazing musicians like John Smith, Hannah Peel, Andy Hickie, visual artists like Mike Badger and Gary Daly, poets like Eleanor Rees and Paul Farley. Our first few events were in Mello Mello on Slater St which was a squat at the time, run by artists. Then we moved on to Sefton Park Palm House, the Black-E, Bluecoat Arts Centre and by 2011 Liverpool Everyman. It was a tornado of a journey. We then took a break when Lindsay and I both became mothers, and we also got very busy with other work, so To Have to Shoot Irishmen is a rebirth of Almanac Arts really. It’s taking everything we talked about at that house party and everything we’ve learnt since and combining it into our most ambitious project by a long shot. It’s been brilliant to draw together so many talented women to make that happen. We’re on a mission.
You’ve managed to build up an impressive portfolio over the last few years, as well as winning awards such as the Amnesty International Award for Freedom of Expression for Unprotected which you co-wrote. What has been your proudest theatrical achievement to date?
That’s hard to answer. It was wonderful to win ‘Best New Play’ for my play with songs Narvik at the UK Theatre Awards last year. There was this sense of culmination to a very long creative journey. I’d worked with Box of Tricks Theatre in Manchester on that play for four years before it was produced. It’s very special to find true collaborators as an artist, and that show was a perfect collaboration for me. Plus, the story was based on my grandfather’s experiences in WWII, so I felt like he was standing next to me when I got the award.
That’s on a parallel with how I felt on our first day of rehearsals for To Have to Shoot Irishmen. Almanac Arts has travelled so far in a year- we’ve gone from putting on one-off events to producing a six-venue tour and to say it’s been a steep learning curve is a massive understatement! Artistically it’s been such a joy so far, with the cast and creative team bringing so much talent and drive to the storytelling. After living with this play in my head for a decade, it was almost surreal to look round the rehearsal room on the first day and think: ‘We’re here. We’re doing it. It’s real.’
With your latest production “To Have to Shoot Irishmen”, which is set around the Easter Rising, can you start by telling us about the characters and how you came to learn of Irish pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and what was it about their story that so captivated your imagination?
Playwright Lizzie Nunnery-To Have to Shoot Irishmen rehearsals
I’d heard that a lot of courageous Irish women were involved in the rebellion in Dublin in 1916 and that they’d been mostly written out to history. So, I started doing some reading, and in the National Library in Dublin and came across Hanna Sheehy Skeffington who was a trailblazing Irish feminist and friend of the Easter rebels. She was twice imprisoned and on hunger strike for her suffragist activism, she was famous for smashing the windows of Dublin castle in protest- she was just incredible. Then as I read about her I, of course, learnt about the horrific murder of her husband Frank, and began to ask, ‘How did she live through that?’ ‘How did she make sense of it?’ ‘How did she walk through those events and keep on walking, keep on fighting?’ I basically fell in love with all four of the real-life characters and got entranced by the devastating choices they had to make.
The play focuses on Frank’s murder by a British soldier, as Hanna tries to unravel what happened to him and why. We also follow the story of 18-year-old William who guards Frank the night before his murder and forms a strange closeness with him; and of Vane, a British officer who failed to prevent the killing. It’s an intense and personal narrative, with the extreme events of the Easter Rising serving as a backdrop to a relationship blown apart.
As a theatre company you look very closely at “Social history and storytelling traditions” for inspiration. I also read that “through live experiments, you challenge artists to blur boundaries between theatre, concert, performance poetry and visual art, making work for gig-goers and theatre-goers alike.” Without giving too much away, how do you go about blurring those lines with “To Have to Shoot Irishmen”.
There are moments in the show when the cast of four actors look like the coolest band you’ve ever seen. We’ve got a piano on stage as well as mandolin, harmonium and percussion. There are moments of glaring naturalism in the play when we look hard at the real events and their social context, but there are also abstract moments when movement and music take over the storytelling and the actors pick up an instrument and sing. One thing folk clubs have taught me is that those shifts between music and text don’t have to be complicated or self-conscious. An audience just wants the story and the emotion, so they’re happy for you to use a range of different tools. Song on stage is a wonderful way to invite people in, to steal their hearts. And you should hear our cast sing!
How well documented were the lives of Frank and Hanna and the events leading up to his execution?
They were incredibly well documented, which was partly what drew me into the story. I felt like a detective on a trail. Three of the characters (Hanna, Frank and Vane) were writers themselves, so that was a good place to start. I read their books, plays, essays and articles.
I also found accounts of the Rising and what happened to Frank written by soldiers and citizens who were there. Hanna toured America in 1917 talking about Frank’s death and the events around it, so through her lecture notes, I could discover exactly what her opinion was of what went on. One particularly moving moment was finding a book of military records in Liverpool University library, looking up my teenage character William Dobbin, and discovering that he was killed by shellfire on the front just months after the events of the play. In the end, it felt like a duty to put these people on the stage.
Where did you take inspiration from for the fictional elements and what did you want to convey through that to your audience?
I’ve been writing the script on and off for years now, and one reason it took a long time was my anxiety around representing these true characters properly. Part of that journey has been allowing myself to move away from the research and fictionalise around it. All the major events are truthful and carefully plotted but then no one really knows what those people said to each other in those moments and days. It’s been exciting and liberating to imagine those conversations, to get lost in the possibilities of those relationships and secret moments. I wanted to resurrect and humanise these people who were stumbling through the tide of history, caught in devastating moments of decision. Most of us are never tested to our limits by the times we live in. The play asks the audience to imagine themselves in that moment of crisis and violence, and asks ‘Who would you be?’
Although the events focus around the 1916 Easter Rising, did you find the story resonated with the world around us today?
There’s a tragic irony that Frank Sheehy Skeffington spent his life campaigning against militarism and violence and then ended up being killed at the end of a gun. I think emotionally that resonates outside the context of the time. The Easter Rising and the British reaction to it was a key moment of violence that fed into the civil war in Ireland, that put in place ripples of violence that run right up to today. That question of what happens after the initial intervention stays relevant. It makes us think about Iraq, Afghanistan and the questions we’re facing in Syria right now. There is a false idea that you can contain violence, that military intervention can be strategic and precise, but history tells us over and again that this isn’t true. You go in, set ripples in motion and have no idea where those ripples of violence will lead. Frank saw that coming in Ireland and wrote about it in plain terms, which is really startling considering the circumstances of his death.
Within the longer story of Ireland, Frank’s death has many parallels. He was a civilian killed at the hands of British forces and that has happened time and again between 1916 and today. It’s important that in Britain we confront those aspects of our history. Britain and Ireland’s history are so tangled up, so many British people have Irish roots (myself included), and yet in schools, we’re taught so little about that relationship.
With Brexit and the question of the Irish border, we’re reminded again how little Britain understands Ireland despite holding so much power to disrupt it. To Have to Shoot Irishmen isn’t a polemic, it looks sympathetically through British and Irish eyes, but it inevitably pictures the British establishment underestimating, patronizing and misunderstanding Ireland. I think that’s relevant right now.
What were the most challenging aspects of this production?
The research is, of course, a big challenge when working from history, but our actors have been so enthusiastic and have worked so hard, as has our Designer Rachael Rooney and the rest of the creative team. Gerard Kearns who plays Frank turned up on day one having read most of Frank’s writing, so I’ve been massively impressed! We’ve had some amazing conversations in the room, but an additional challenge has been to draw a line under that, using the script as our blueprint rather than looking beyond it. It’s been liberating to get on our feet and just play.
A more practical challenge is the use of an upright piano in the show! It’s a key image on stage and a big part of the musical arrangements, so there’s no way around it, but taking a piano in and out of six venues is never going to be easy. We’ll all have big muscles by the end of the tour!
Can you tell us much about the music and song in the play?
We’ve got a mix of traditional songs written at the time, and original songs by myself and Vidar Norheim. People were writing songs in 1916 to comment on daily events so they’re almost like newspaper articles. It’s been exciting to make new arrangements for those songs, twisting and contorting then to give different meanings and raise new questions. We’ve had fun coming up with unconventional ways of playing instruments, so we’ve got percussion played on a harmonium, piano strings plucked and kicked, bowed mandolin… The vocal arrangements have been a particular joy to work on. All our actors are great singers but Elinor Lawless who plays Hanna has a voice that will make your heart soar one moment and blow your head off the next. On top of that Vidar is creating a recorded sound design to run through the play, taking the naturalistic sounds of the conflict in Dublin and pushing them to strange musical places. I can’t wait to put all the pieces together!
To Have To Shoot Irishmen will be at the Omnibus Theatre from the 2-20 Oct (link https://www.omnibus-clapham.
To Have To Shoot Irishmen Tour Dates
Thu 25 – Sat 27 Oct at 7.30pm- Liverpool Everyman Theatre
As part of Liverpool Irish Festival
Tuesday 30 October at 8pm – Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury
Thursday 1 & Friday 2 November at 8pm- Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury
Monday 5 November at 7.30pm- Mumford Theatre, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Tuesday 6 November at 8pm – The Arts Centre at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk