1916: An examination of the Easter Rising as a cultural event is provocative and timely.
My generation can be forgiven for viewing the 1916 Rising as a morbid relative that shows up once a year. The newly prosperous middle classes aren't hanging proclamations of the new republic in their designer hallways. To do so would be rather like discovering a rifle bullet amongst the toothbrushes.
At the 50th anniversary in 1966, I lined up alongside Pádraig Pearse (played by Ray MacAnally, I should add) in a commemorative "pageant" entitled Aiséirí. Staged in Croke Park during Easter week, the piece was directed by my father, Tomás, a producer of plays at the Abbey Theatre. The pageant, which appears several times in James Moran's new book, was a colourful, highly organised and completely over-the-top extravaganza that resulted in glorified confusion - very much like the Rising itself. However, despite a hurricane season that often drowned speeches and demolished Brit heavy artillery, it succeeded in conveying a sense that we owed our freedom to Pearse and company's "blood sacrifice".
That feeling was re-emphasised, however unintentionally, by RTÉ's Insurrection. Written by Hugh Leonard, Insurrection was an exhilarating mini- series in the format of a documentary news programme that featured interviews with protagonists and onlookers, analysis of the fighting and even "live footage" of the rebellion.
That combination of stage and TV screen suddenly made our outlaw history extremely exciting. Pearse, Connolly, Plunkett et al seemed like the Magnificent Seven. For months afterwards my 10-year-old pals and I staged re-enactments of 1916 up the back fields in Howth. We ignored the bit where the Magnificent Seven morphed into the Firing Squad 16, perhaps because getting plugged in the GPO or on a Dublin street seemed far more heroic than being "executed".
Later, when the hardcore reality of the Troubles erupted and the men of 1916 became patriotic icons mainly to diehard nationalists or Provos, it became less of a head-wreck to seek role models in the modern safety zones of rock music and movie icons.
James Moran's book is an attempt to re-examine and re-evaluate the 1916 Rising as a theatrical and cultural event. Most academic books are dry affairs, written in dull, formal language that often reads like a technical manual for a device that you were once keen on but are now deeply sorry you bought. Moran though, is an engaging writer and his original, opinionated and compelling study makes for a terrific read, despite occasional lapses that betray the book's origins as a PhD thesis.
Moran offers new interpretations of plays by Pearse, MacDonagh and Connolly (Under Which Flag) while re-assessing plays about the Rising by Yeats and O'Casey along with several other less familiar playwrights whose long-forgotten early works are given a new context. He probes the origins of Aiséirí-type commemorations (Dev started it) and explores the reasons why 1916's protagonists became irredeemably mythologised. De Valera's role comes under severe scrutiny along with those played by the Fianna Fáil party and the Church. For several decades, the legacy of the Rising became a manifestation of the more conservative aspects of a repressive and unimaginative new state, an Ireland from which we may only now be awakening.
MORAN ALSO ARGUES that the Rising had a sexual agenda. Its mission to proclaim sexual equality has been brushed aside by history (along with the Rising's heroines), an aim that perished with the leaders in Kilmainham.
The 1916 leaders have been hijacked and welded to so many different elements of nationalism that it is now difficult to imagine them as ordinary men and women who decided, for a variety of reasons, to take up arms. The Rising was the most effective street theatre ever seen in this country and its staging was so compelling that no great novel or film and certainly no playwright since O'Casey has succeeded in capturing its human essence. As Moran indicates, Irish writers and artists have tended to replace one myth with another or else sidestep the issues by focusing on the intimate lives (or lack of them) of 1916's protagonists, particularly the sexual orientation of Pearse and Casement.
The irony is that whenever we wish to pay tribute to 1916 or attempt to understand many of the issues of the time, we revive The Plough and the Stars, a play that seeks to undermine the ideals of republicanism. (Perhaps the "staging" in Kilmainham of Donal O'Kelly's new play on the Rising will help steer us away from such revivalism.)
Perhaps by 2016 we will have worked out how best to deal with 1916's legacy. One solution might be to commission a visionary and irreverent street theatre company such as Macnas to re-imagine, even dispel, the many po-faced myths. It would be a healthy thing to see nine-foot-tall puppet figures of the signatories of the Proclamation reclaiming O'Connell Street for street theatre insurrectionists everywhere.
Moran's engaging study is brave, timely and provocative.
Ferdia Mac Anna is a writer, lecturer and musician. His memoir, The Rocky Years, has just been published in paperback by Hodder Headline
Staging the Rising: 1916 as Theatre By James Moran Cork University Press, 184pp. €39