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, 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.
Lizzie Nunnery said “To Have to Shoot Irishmen has been a long-term labour of love. In 2007 I stumbled upon the history of Frank and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and from that moment they wouldn’t stop talking to me. I was captivated by their political passion, their personal story and their own writing. They were true trailblazers as pacifists, socialists and feminists. The horrific circumstances of Frank’s death in Dublin in 1916 say so much about the brutalising effects of militarism and Britain’s chaotic intervention with other nations. This is a play about Britain and Ireland, but it speaks of so many other conflicts, of so many acts of silencing. It’s a resonant story for our times that I had to tell.’
