Liverpool playwright and songwriter Lizzie Nunnery returns to the Everyman Theatre 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 and produced by Lizzie Nunnery’s Almanac Arts, To Have to Shoot Irishmen will visit the Everyman as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival from Thursday 25 to Saturday 27 October.
To Have to Shoot Irishmen explores the events around Sheehy Skeffington’s death during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. As 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.
Merging fictionalized scenes with historic document, and traditional songs with original music and movement, To Have to Shoot Irishmen is a fluid and absorbing performance that interrogates history to ask vital contemporary questions.