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
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