At the time of going to
press, this play has been written and work shopped but not yet
performed. It is due to open on May 20th 2016 with Benny
Young as Casement and Stevie Clyde as Hall - and everybody else -
at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow directed by Andy Arnold.
Sometimes, it's all
about the present tense. This is particularly true when working on a
story that is almost exactly 100 years old and a play that is being
published before the first performance. I mean that in that to begin
with, the play is about the Irish Independence struggle at a time
when Ireland is very largely re-imagining itself, especially with
regard to homosexuality. On the 50th anniversary of the
Easter Rising (when Casement was dis-interred from Pentonville Gaol
and re-buried – against his wishes – in Glasnevin Cemetery in
Dublin) it was still conventional wisdom in Irish Republican circles
that the British had forged the notorious “Black Diaries” that
recounted the sex life of this most complex and contradictory of the
complex and contradictory revolutionaries of 1916. In Ireland
itself the centenary is being marked with nuances and negotiations
that owe as much to what happened in the years after the celebrations
of 1966...and the way they fed into the Civil Rights struggle in the
North ..as they do to the ways in which Irish Society is re-imagining
itself on both sides of the border of 1921.
Second, the
“present-tenseness” of a play about events around the Easter
Rising in the context of Scotland at a time when, had the referendum
gone the other way, we would be in the early weeks on Independence
ourselves is another source of currency for a play about the
beginning of what Tom Nairn called “The Break Up of Britain.”
Third, and most
importantly for the way the play is written, there is a general
problem with historical drama, and that is in deciding what the
present tense of the play IS! This is particularly true in a context
where a good many of the first audience (this being Glasgow) will
know a good deal of that history, but rather more of the audience (it
not being Ireland) will know little or nothing. Indeed, the advance
publicity for the play (which had to be written before the play
script was finished) doesn';t quite describe the exact manner of
setting that I decided on quite late in the process.
I had thought initially
that the present would be Casement in between his sentence of death
(on June 28th 1916) and his execution (on August 3rd
that year) and that we and he would look back on his long and varied
career as a British Diplomat, Irish Revolutionary and Human Rights
Pioneer while his reputation was being surreptitiously destroyed by
the circulation of the “Black Diaries” by the prototypical
Special Branch. But then I looked at the partial transcripts of
Casement's two days of interrogation at Scotland Yard immediately
after his capture that took place on Easter Sunday and Easter
Monday...and quickly saw that in the contrasting circumstances on
those two days – both Casement and the British thought on the
Sunday that the Rising had been called off, and both were shocked
when it actually happened at noon on Easter Monday – and that here
was a “present tense” when
“what-everyone-knows-happened-hasn't-happened-yet.”
It then became my job
to shoehorn all the complexity and ambiguity I've felt about Casement since I first learned the outlines of his story into those
two days...and the memories and prophecies, the past and future
tenses... evoked in that present. The help of Andy and the actors in
doing that (with the support of the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland)
was invaluable.
Now, I hope that on the
page or the stage, or both, and both for the historically informed
(and committed, this being about Ireland, God help me as a Scotsman!)
what follows will be of interest and provocation. Because it's too
late to change it now.
That's the problem with
the present tense. It's over before you know it.
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