New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival 

In preparation for the Studio Theatre’s reading of British playwright and singer/songwriter Lizzie Nunnery’s play, To Have to Shoot Irishmen, she and Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel engaged in a transatlantic correspondence about Nunnery’s play, how she came to write a play about Irish Nationals for Druid, and the way historic songs and documents spark her imagination.

Adrien-Alice Hansel: You’re from outside Liverpool, and have written several plays about Ireland or the Irish diaspora—I’m curious about how you think of your relationship with Ireland, and with place more generally.

Lizzie Nunnery: I’m from Maghull in North Liverpool, so definitely consider Liverpool my city. I wrote a play Intemperance which was staged at the Liverpool Everyman in 2007, which was about a very poor Irish immigrant family in Liverpool in 1854. I suppose my awareness that I have a lot of Irish blood in my family’s history, drew me particularly to stories of Irish incomers, although the play also has a Norwegian character and references all sorts of other immigrant populations in the city at that time. I’m not Irish but my Granddad sang me Irish folk songs as a child and my father has a passion for Irish history which he passed on to me. Liverpool is not Ireland but it’s also not a particularly English city in terms of the way people view themselves and their history, and I think the broad perspective that gave me when approaching the commission for Druid was really useful. I think a big part of the task of being a playwright is to empathize and imagine from alien and opposing perspectives (whether or not you sympathize with those perspectives), and in a way having grown up in Liverpool, poised between Ireland and England, stood me in good stead for exploring those utterly conflicting Irish and English viewpoints in relation to the Easter Rising.

How did you fall in with Druid?

Thomas [Conway, Druid’s Literary Manager] read my play Intemperance (I think someone at the Liverpool Everyman sent it to Druid) and at that time he was looking for a non-Irish writer to take on the task of creating a new play about the 1916 Easter Rising. He specifically wanted a writer whose view point wasn’t too clouded by growing up with all the mythmaking surrounding the events of that Easter week. He was kind enough to come all the way to Liverpool to meet me. We had a brilliant chat, a cup of tea and at the end of it he offered me a six month research commission. I remember saying goodbye to him outside the cafe and virtually flying down the road. That was one of those moments when it’s good to be a writer.

What led you to start writing about the Easter Rising and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington?

The broader topic of the Rising was set for me but I had a lot of freedom to explore within that, in those first six months of research. It’s such an enormous riddle of stories to take on and there are so many ways I could have gone with the play. I thought perhaps I’d be interested in looking at the role of women in the Rising and so came across the incredible feminist pacifist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Frequently I came across references to her husband Francis, and the two same facts were repeated: he was a friend of the rebels but not a rebel, and he was murdered by an insane British Captain during the Rising. I then basically fell in love with Hanna and Frank, but also through looking at their work got drawn in to their ideas. I began to question, ‘Is it practically possible to be a Pacifist Nationalist?’ and that was the way in for me.

In addition to your playwriting, you’re a prolific singer/songwriter. Do your songs and plays come from a similar impulse?

Yes, definitely. There’s such a link between the two. I go through phases of being fixated with certain images or ideas and they’ll pop up all over my songs and plays. With both playwriting and songwriting I’ll start with an instinct or a feeling, and then move on to the task of creating something disciplined and structured out of that. When I was first writing songs they were mostly very confessional but I more and more feel compelled to tell other people’s stories now (even if I’m singing in the first person), and I think my playwriting has gone on a parallel journey.

Has working in one medium influenced your work in another, or the kinds of stories you’re interested in?

My interest in folk music tradition has definitely seeped in to my playwriting. I’m really interested in the idea of songs and stories as historical documents. There’s something incredibly moving and humanizing in someone singing a hundred-year-old song that still holds relevance and has impact today. That desire to connect with history and understand the present via the past is definitely in my work as a playwright, even when my work’s set in the present. I’m writing a play called The Swallowing Dark at the moment which is set in present day Liverpool and Zimbabwe, and follows that same theme of piecing ourselves together by what went before, and understanding ourselves via passed down stories.

I’m curious to hear how you came to the music in To Have to Shoot Irishmen.

I first heard ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’ a couple of years ago at a folk night in Liverpool, performed by a musician called Stan Ambrose and was so moved by the content. I remember a chill running down me when he sang the title line. The song was sung by soldiers during WWI and I love the bleak humour of it. I wanted to include political songs contemporary to 1916 in the play, so through lots of research came across the lyrics for ‘A Row in the Town’ and ‘The Grand Old Dame Britannia’. They’re both funny firey songs with so much political drive. ‘Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem’ I found in an old Protestant hymn book my Dad got in a second hand shop. I was looking for an Easter hymn, opened the book up, and there it was. It has a heart breakingly beautiful melody.

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