Friday 26 October 2018

REVIEW: To Have To Shoot Irishmen - The Everyman Theatre, Liverpool.



Part of the Liverpool Irish Festival, this play is set around the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. It helps with the understanding of the play a great deal if you know your Irish history. Using mixed media of song, live music, art and drama this seventy-minute ‘play with songs’, by Lizzie Nunnery, relates an incident where pacifist and campaigner for peace and social justice Francis Skeffington – Frank (Gerard Kearns) is pulled from the crowd by British soldiers while on his way home (moving away from the fighting), arrested and held without charge for two days before being shot by an English Captain John Bowen Colthurst. 

The play examines the actions of the eighteen-year old soldier who guarded him William (Robbie O’Neill), British military officer Sir Francis Vane (Russell Richardson) who exposed Frank’s murder and Frank’s wife, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (Elinor Lawless), a suffragette. Director Gemma Kerr works with a well-qualified talented cast of four actor/musicians/singers to bring the story to life on a stage that is dominated by the arty set.

The open set designed by Rachel Rooney is interesting as the theatre fills and eerie music plays. There is a huge damaged, heavy steel support running around the top of the stage on three steel posts that provide a frame for the set. Smashed and displaced grey painted furniture piled, stage left, is dominated by an upright piano minus its casing. Small rubble and broken glass lie around the side. Stage right, a low rectangular cement block is lit (lighting designed by Richard Owen) squarely throughout effectively delineating the space of a prison cell. This could happily be an art installation.

Led by Frank’s wife Hanna, the cast are on stage throughout, singing and playing instruments, (including a mandolin and the strings of the broken piano). We learn through a mix of Irish traditional and new songs (written by Nunnery and Vidar Norheim), but mostly through speeches that Frank is missing and their home has been ransacked by British military under martial law. Vane entering, in military uniform, attempts to explain to a hostile Hanna (who was interred for two months and went on hunger strike) what has happened to Frank and how he has subsequently lost his job for exposing the murder. Frank paces his cell while talking to the boy guard.

Writer Lizzie Nunnery attempts to extract a great deal from a single little-known true event using storytelling rather than showing the key events. Like Frank, the play tries to relate to all views which is an impossible task. Beautiful in parts, I failed to be moved by the production. The play needs a stronger written framework to place the story of Ireland’s most known suffragette and display the talents of this quality cast.

Reviewer - Barbara Sherlock
on - 26/10/18

No comments:

Post a Comment