Skip to main content
News

In Conversation With | Playwright Lizzie Nunnery

By September 21, 20182 Comments

Lizzie Nunnery is a woman with many strings to her bow. Playwright, singer-songwriter, award winner (UK Theatre Awards 2017). Her new play To Have To Shoot Irishmen will premiere at Omnibus Theatre this October, as part of our season of Irish work. Steve Pratt sat down with Lizzie to get the 411 on this latest project.


STEVE PRATT: Why did you write this play?

LIZZIE NUNNERY: I’m a history lover and about ten years ago I started reading a lot about the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and got excited when I came across this story of the Sheehy Skeffingtons. Hanna was an early feminist and suffragist and was imprisoned and on hunger strike twice in her life because of her activism for the suffrage movement. She was this incredible woman and I really wanted to tell her story. So often women are written out of history and that’s very true of the events of the Easter Rising. There’s so much focus on the heroic men involved and not very much on the heroic women. Hanna played an interesting part in that she was friends with the nationalist rebels who marched into town and declared a free Ireland. But her and her husband Frank’s position was that Ireland could be free without bloodshed. They were pacifists and feminists as well as nationalists. I think knowing what we know now, that’s a really moving and stirring vision of Ireland. I wanted to ask the question through the play: was there ever a peaceful way for Ireland to be free? More than anything I wanted to tell Hanna and Frank’s extraordinary story of love, violence and loss. The extreme events of the Rising are a backdrop to a relationship blown apart.


“There’s so much focus on the heroic men involved and not very much on the heroic women.”


SP: What’s the focus of the play?

LN: It’s about Hanna’s response to her husband’s murder by a British soldier, about the way it impacts on her and transforms her. It’s also about chaos and the lack of control we all have over our lives: the words we can never take back once said, the ripples we put in motion that can’t then be stopped. On a small scale that’s played out in the emotional warfare of the characters, and on a large scale it’s the British military rolling into Dublin with their bombs and their machine guns.

During the events of the Easter Rising, Frank was out walking the streets calling for peace and trying to stop looters. While he was walking over a bridge near Portobello Barracks on the edge of Dublin he was pulled from the crowd and arrested without charge. On orders from a British soldier, John Bowen Colthurst, Frank was held for two days in the barracks and then taken into the yard and shot before a firing squad with two other men. I became haunted and fixated by this relatively recent history and these appalling acts of brutality. The story raises big resonant questions about Britain’s attitude to other nations. I’m fascinated by the complexity of our relationship with Ireland then and now. In the play I explore the character of William, an 18-year-old Anglo Irish lad who guards Frank in his cell. William wants nothing more than to serve the British military with honour- but as the events of the story unravel, his identity unravels too. The title of the play comes from a quote from Bowen Colhurst. On the night before he killed Frank he was reported to have said, ‘Isn’t it dreadful to have to shoot Irishmen’.

SP: How are songs used in the play?

LN: With Narvik it was so fulfilling to use music as part of the storytelling. It felt successful to use music to create atmosphere and draw the audience into a more intimate relationship with the characters, so I wanted to do something similar again. Many of the songs in this play are versions of traditional songs, so it’s a mix of songs I’ve composed with Vidar (Norheim, her Narvik co-composer) and traditional songs that we’ve twisted, contorted to allow them to have slightly different meanings. People were writing songs at the time to comment on daily events so they’re almost like newspaper articles, giving you all the detail of why people were killed and how they were killed. They’ve become anthems, and some have become IRA songs, but they started as reporting of the day’s events. I’m excited to present them in a new context to compel the audience to look at those lyrics, those tunes and those events freshly.

SP: How much research was involved in writing the play?

LN: It took a long time because there was so much there. But it was easy in the sense that there was a lot of material available. I have this huge file of documents. The wonderful thing about writing Irish history is that the cliché is true that Ireland is a nation of writers and poets. It’s such a literary history. So, there are accounts of Easter Week in Dublin in 1916 and what happened in Portobello barracks written by various soldiers and citizens who were there. One of the characters in the play is Sir Francis Vane, the British officer who gives Hannah the news that her husband is dead. The real Sir Francis wrote several books about the art of warfare and his own experiences in conflict, so I had such intimate access to this real-life character through his own writings. Hannah toured America talking about her husband’s death and the events around it, so I could find her lecture notes and know exactly what her opinion was of what went on. So that’s really thrilling as a writer. However, part of the journey with this play has been allowing myself to move away from the research and real people and fictionalise around that- create something new and striking from it.

SP: What are the challenges of mixing fact and fiction in the play?

LN: All the major events are truthful and very carefully plotted in the timeline of what really happened. But then no one really knows what people said to each other in those moments and days. That’s the fun for a writer, to imagine what those conversations, such as when a man wearing a British army uniform turns up to tell Hanna her husband is dead. How does she respond? How grateful can she be? How much animosity is there? I was really moved by the idea of the 18-year-old boy William who guarded Frank the night before he was killed: imagining that child who’s wearing a uniform and holding a gun. He’s put in this extreme situation that he can’t really understand until it’s too late. So, there’s a lot of that kind of fictionalising. I enjoyed getting lost in the possibilities of what that relationship might be and what they might come to mean to each other in those hours.


 “I want the people who see the play to feel the closeness of these events and feel that connection to now.”


SP: Is the play relevant to today?

LN: I think it resonates with current conflicts. I want the people who see the play to feel the closeness of these events and feel that connection to now. 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 now. There is a false idea that you can contain violence, that you can go in and be strategic and precise, but history tells us repeatedly that this isn’t true. You go in, set ripples in motion and have no idea where those ripples of violence will lead. That April morning in 1916 when the Irish rebels picked up their guns and walked into town with a heroic intention, they never knew where it would carry them or their country. And when the British army stormed in and crushing that relatively small rebellion in such a violent, terrible way there was no turning back. They cracked everything open.

In a strange way it’s a play about parents and children too, which is relevant to all of us. There’s always the question of what our children are inheriting, what we’re creating or destroying for that next generation. Imagine what a frightening thought that would have been when looking out the window at a bullet riddled, bomb blasted Dublin.

There’s a nice family link in our creative team too. The play’s designer Rachael Rooney is a distant cousin of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington– her grandmother was Hanna’s cousin. Rachael didn’t tell us this until after she got the job. It seems like a weird magical coincidence that she’s working on the story of her family. Also, it’s her first ever professional design job, which makes it even more special.

SP: Do you prefer writing plays or songs?

LN: Plays take a lot more energy because of the long format and very often you end up with a play that’s an hour and a half long and you’ve thrown away so much more than you’ve ever kept. It can be such a huge undertaking and that is true of this play. Songs are a bit harder to control- often they hit you out of nowhere or they don’t arrive at all. But I love writing songs and find it easier to write them in the context of plays because they arise out of the characters and out of the situations. You’re not trying to pluck inspiration out of the sky. I’m looking at these people and thinking, ‘If you could sing what would you say?’

SP: How about writing a musical?

LN: I would like to write a musical, but I don’t take it lightly. It’s a very technical and specific form. My play The Sum (Liverpool Everyman 2017) had ten songs in it and had characters singing directly to the audience so that was moving more into that musical territory. But I know musicals must operate in a way with songs always pushing the narrative forward. The abstract way I like to deal with lyrics- I imagine Stephen Sondheim wouldn’t approve! I’d like to write a musical, but I need to get my head around a subject best suited to that form.

SP: What did winning the UK Theatre Award for Narvik mean?

LN: It was lovely to have the recognition. I developed Narvik with Box of Tricks Theatre and director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder, and it was such a collaboration between the two of us and the actors who were with us for the journey over about four years. So, it was amazing just to have all that hard work highlighted. The UK Theatre Awards are so important for showing the significance of theatre outside London. People everywhere need theatre. If we believe in it, we believe in it for everyone. From that point of view, I felt very proud and pleased. It remains to be seen what effect it has. I hope it means that more people come and see this next play. I’m in the early stages of developing a new play with Box of Tricks which is going to be a big scale piece with an all-female cast, so I hope the award means we can build momentum and get more people excited about that new project as well.

SP: How does being a singer-songwriter on the folk circuit fit into your life?

LN: The nice thing that’s happened is that so many of my plays now have my music in them, whereas for a long time the music and the playwriting were separate things. Now they are absolutely tangled up in each other. They feel one and the same now. When I do gigs we perform songs from Narvik and my other plays. People are really interested in that crossover when I do gigs in folk clubs. I talk to the audience about the stories of the plays and even read extracts. That fits well in the tradition of folk clubs, people getting up telling stories, telling jokes, as well as singing a song. So, in some ways it’s all come together perfectly. I would hate to ever stop performing as a musician. There’s a release there and a personal connection with an audience that’s irreplaceable. I can’t possibly choose between singing and writing.


TO HAVE TO SHOOT IRISHMEN will be at Omnibus Theatre from 2 – 20 Oct – get your tickets HERE→

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Jonathan O'Grady says:

    A footnote on Bowen Colthurst’s words “To have to shoot Irishmen”. In 2016 I talked to a B.C. journalist who knew Colthurst and described his accent as very much that of a British officer although he was born in Cork.

    Thank you for shedding a fresh light on the tragic story of Sheehy Skeffington and other victims.

  • I am very much looking forward to seeing this play as Hanna has been a heroine since finally learning about these great Irish women that we certainly never heard about when we were at school. It was only the flurry of feminist activity and the books it generated in the 80s that we got to discover oor female predecessors.
    Having researched Hanna and Anglo Irish Charlotte Despard who was Battersea based and other Irish women at the Fawcett Library I was approached by a women’s press to see if I would be interested in writing for their series. As I was not one for academic rigour I declined but I did contact Andree Sherhy Skeffington, Hanna’s daughter-in-law who told me that their was a biography of Hanna about to be published. More recently I have been in touch with Hanna’s grand daughter Michelene and learnt of the gender discrimination case being brought against the university NUIG and of her tour of the US reprising her grandmother’s visit/speaking tour.
    Incidentally, Michelene is giving a Q and A at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this evening 29th after the play about Hanna!
    Hanna was a friend of Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 whose biographer tagged her Socialist, Suffragette and Sinn Feiner ,went to live in Ireland after the election in 1918 in which she stood for Battersea. She and Hanna went to Russia in 1930. A group of women in Battersea have been celebrating Charlotte and the Battersea Labour Party will be unveiling a plaque in Lavender Hill and we have a campaign to have a statue of her in the Nine Elms area where she lived and worked among the people providing welfare facilities. Doing our bit to share women’s history.
    I have booked for the night of the post show interview. Good luck with the show.

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

Don’t miss a thing – sign up to the Omnibus Theatre newsletter for the latest updates and offers on our shows.

Not right now!

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

Don’t miss a thing – sign up to the Omnibus Theatre newsletter for the latest updates and offers on our shows.

Not right now!

Resize font