CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
Performing Re-Imagined Memories: Signatories and the Centenary of the Easter Rising
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Master of Arts in Theatre
By
Madeline Fanton
May 2018
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Copyright by Madeline Fanton 2018
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The thesis of Madeline Fanton is approved:
_________________________________________ __________________ Dr. Ah-jeong Kim Date
_________________________________________ __________________ Dr. Hillary Miller Date
_________________________________________ __________________ Dr. J’aime Morrison, Chair Date
California State University, Northridge
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Preface: Table of Monologues and Authors
I have listed below the eight authors and the corresponding monologue they wrote for the
play Signatories. With 8 writers, 8 characters, and the audience moving through the space
of Kilmainham Gaol, it can be hard to connect each character to their individual
performance. The interjections in chapters one, two, and three of this thesis that appear in
brackets and italics are my personal observations from the video recording provided by
UCD. These descriptions are written in hopes of giving the reader a strong sense of each
character’s setting and posture.
Author Signatory/Monologue
Emma Donaghue Elizabeth O’Farrell
Thomas Kilroy Padraig Pearse
Hugo Hamilton James Connolly
Frank McGuinness Éamonn Ceannt
Rachel Feehily Thomas Clarke
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Séan Mac Diarmada
Marina Carr Thomas MacDonagh
Joseph O’Connor Joseph Mary Plunkett
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Dedication
Dedicated to: Dr. J’aime Morrison, who inspired me; Dr. Hillary Miller, who
challenged me; Dr. Ah-jeong Kim, who encouraged me; Mom & Dad, who supported me;
and Nick, who carried me.
A special thank you to Eilis O’Brien and University College Dublin for allowing me to
view a video recording of the Signatories performance at Kilmainham Gaol.
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Signature Page ii
Copyright iii
Preface: Table of Monologues and Authors iv
Dedication v
Abstract vii
Introduction: Methodology and Review of the Literature 1
Chapter 1: The Echoing Voice, The Lingering Face 15
Traces of Cultural Narratives and Images from 1916 in 2016
Chapter 2: Something You Can Touch 33
Objects and Artifacts from 1916 in 2016
Chapter 3: Moving Through Space 50
Lingering Choreographies and Geographies of 1916 in 2016
Conclusion: Locating Signatories in the Larger Centenary Dreamscape 68
Afterword: Commemorative Dreamscapes of the Non-Western World 76
Works Cited 80
Appendix i: Easter Proclamation 86
Appendix ii: Production Still 87
Appendix iii: Photograph of the Surrender 88
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Abstract
Performing Re-Imagined Memories: Signatories and the Centenary of the Easter Rising
By
Madeline Fanton
Master of Arts in Theatre
On Easter Monday of 1916, after decades of increasing Irish nationalist sentiment,
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, in tandem with the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish
Volunteers, staged a short-lived rebellion against British colonial rule. Seven leaders of
the independence movement signed a document, now called the Easter Proclamation.
These signatories have been mainstays of the Irish cultural imagination surrounding the
Rising and its subsequent cultural and political implications. 2016 marked the centenary
of this insurrection, known as the Easter Rising. In commemoration of the centenary,
eight of Ireland’s contemporary playwrights came together to create a performance that
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would give voice to each of the seven signatories of the Easter Proclamation and the
nurse who delivered their eventual surrender. This commemorative performance project,
titled Signatories, was commissioned by University College Dublin as part of the larger
Decade of Centenaries state commemorations. The monologues of Signatories
incorporate historical information drawn from archival materials and fill in the gaps with
imagined memories, experiences, and cultural mythology drawn from the repertoire,
simultaneously creating a new archival article, the text, while transmitting embodied
knowledge through the performance. Signatories falls somewhere in-between archive and
repertoire. This in-between space is akin to dream, where it is hard to distinguish what is
real and what is imagined, where space, time, and identity are fluid, where images
constructed from lived experiences mingle with images of hope, terror, and subconscious
sensations not yet realized.
Chapter One of this thesis addresses the ways that cultural narratives, preserved
through linguistic imagery, are performed in Signatories. Chapter Two discusses the
performance of artifacts and the way these more traditional archival materials interact
with the live performance of the monologues. These artifacts foster an embodied
semiotics that allows for consideration of how memory and history can be preserved and
imagined through the handling of archival materials. Chapter Three explores the
performativity of spaces that appear in the language and imagination of the characters as
well as the movements that occur around and within them. The site-specific element, the
staging of Signatories at Kilmainham Gaol, is also considered.
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Introduction: Methodology and Review of the Literature
The 2016 play, Signatories, written by eight Irish writers to commemorate the
centenary of the Easter Rising, is the center point for this study. The Signatories project
was conceived as part of University College Dublin’s “Decade of Centenaries” public
engagement program. The play was commissioned by the university to present a
theatrical experience of what the seven signatories of the Proclamation, as well as Nurse
Elizabeth O’Farrell might have thought and felt. As the anchor for my thesis, my analysis
includes a literary and performative analysis of this text in relationship to the original
event in 1916. Performance analysis is approached through the lens of Stanton B.
Garner’s thoughts on theatrical phenomenology, explained in his book, Bodied Spaces:
Phenomenology and the Performance of Modern Drama. The play is studied as a literal
embodiment of the imagined cultural mythology of the seven signatories of the Easter
Proclamation.
Garner’s perspective is unique in that he takes theatrical texts as his study for
phenomenal experience in the theatre, believing that “the text coordinates the elements of
performance and puts them into play” and therefore “supports the specific needs of
phenomenological analysis” (Bodied Spaces, Garner, 6). This approach is invaluable to
the present study, as I am unable to experience the performance events examined here
first-hand. I have been able to view a performance of Signatories that was recorded for
the University and my personal observations of this viewing experience are included in
my analysis. These observations are flagged in the footnotes and can also be found in
several sections of bracketed and italicized text. The text that appears in the brackets
includes my own description of the setting, character, and orientation of each monologue.
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These are creative descriptions based on my viewing of the video-taped performance of
Signatories at Kilmainham Gaol and are designed to connect the reader the performance
experience.
The frame of phenomenology put forth by Garner includes examination of both
theatrical space and the body itself in performance as sites of phenomenological
experience. The study of two different but interrelated sites of experience echoes the
main theoretical frame of this thesis: the different but interrelated modes of cultural
transmission, the archive and the repertoire. Garner and Diana Taylor provide
foundational language for talking about the concrete versus ephemeral, embodied
elements of the centenary celebration and the way in which Signatories occupies a unique
space on the continuum between archive and repertoire, past and present, dreams and
reality.
The Rising has been commemorated since 1917 with ceremonies and
remembrances of varying intensity, arriving at the centenary commemoration in 2016.
Official commemorations have included parades, city tours, statues, pageants, televised
events, and theatrical productions. In commemoration of the centenary in 2016,
University College Dublin commissioned eight contemporary Irish writers (Hugo
Hamilton, Frank McGuinness, Rachel Fehily, Ellis Ni Dhuibhne, Marina Carr, Emma
Donaghue, Thomas Kilroy, and Joseph O’Connor), all with personal and academic ties to
UCD, to create a performance that would give voice to each of the seven signatories of
the Easter Proclamation: James Connolly, Eamonn Ceannt, Thomas Clarke, Sean Mac
Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Padraig Pearse, and Joseph Plunkett, and the nurse who
delivered their eventual surrender, Elizabeth O’Farrell. Each writer chose one of the
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historical figures and wrote a ten-minute monologue to represent them. These
monologues made up the performance called Signatories, which was initially staged in
Kilmainham Gaol1 where the actual signatories of the Proclamation were held and
executed after their defeat. This collection of monologues is expressly not historical,
rather, the writers were given license to imagine what might have been the inner thoughts
of these individuals. To UCD’s Director of Communication and Marketing, Eilis
O’Brien, Signatories was intended to take the audience “beyond the realm of history and
political science” (Signatories Preface, x).
On Easter Monday of 1916, after decades of increasing Irish nationalist sentiment,
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, in tandem with the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish
Volunteers, staged a short-lived rebellion against British colonial rule. The members of
these organizations seized several locations in Dublin, setting their main headquarters at
the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), the city’s
main thoroughfare. The key players authored a document, now known as the Easter
Proclamation, declaring Ireland as an independent republic and instating a provisional
government. This document was not sent to the governing bodies at home nor abroad,
instead, it was read aloud on the first day of the insurrection in front of the GPO by one
of the Rising’s central figures, Padraig Pearse2. The Proclamation was, in effect, a script,
performed by Pearse as the inciting action of a week of rebellion and calling an
imaginary free Ireland into existence by its very declaration. The Proclamation is a
dramatic text in that it was designed to be performed and that is was prescriptive; it
1 The Gaelic spelling of “jail.” 2 In my research, I have seen Pearse’s first name spelled several different ways (Patrick, Paidric, Padraig). I will use the spelling which is used in Signatories.
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declares Ireland’s freedom. Further contributing to the dramatic effect of the document,
most of the signatories of the Proclamation were not politicians or soldiers, but poets,
playwrights, teachers, and activists. Six days later, on April 29, 1916, members of the
Rising’s military council surrendered to the British unconditionally. There were losses on
both sides, including the execution of all the signatories of the Proclamation, but it was
civilians who suffered the greatest number of deaths. Though objectively unsuccessful
from a military standpoint, this grassroots rebellion, known as the Easter Rising, has
become a significant marker in Ireland’s history and the story of its national identity.
Over the hundred years since its occurrence, this event has been analyzed, represented,
imagined, and mythologized in various mediums of art.
Many scholars have examined the connections between literature, drama, and the
Rising. William Irwin Thompson’s The Imagination of an Insurrection (1972) traces the
development of the Irish literary renaissance as a movement which simultaneously grew
out of and fed the nationalist sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He frames
the literary contributions of this period as texts wherein writers like Lady Gregory, W.B.
Yeats, Padraig Pearse, and Thomas MacDonagh imagined a Gaelic past into being in
order to imagine a new nationalist future and national identity. Similarly, Declan
Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1996) is a multi-faceted examination of the works of writers
which shaped Ireland’s national identity. He uses the word “invent” to theorize the
literary works’ contributions, suggesting a more active shaping of national discourse and
identity than Thompson’s “imagine.” However, neither of these texts places strong
significance on performance as embodied cultural creation and transmission. Surely,
imagination and invention were necessary in the formation of Ireland’s post-colonial
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national identity and, more specific to this study, the history and representation of the
Easter Rising in the public consciousness. Both scholars’ attention is centered on the
cultural and artistic efforts that led to the Rising’s enactment, with less concern for the
continuation of the event’s legacy and expression in culture and national identity through
performance.
In a more recent study of the Rising, James Moran does address the theatrical
incarnations of Easter Week, 1916, but does so specifically in order to examine the
gender politics of the insurrection and its subsequent dramatic representations. He asserts
that at the time of his writing in the early 2000s, there was little scholarship focused upon
the impact of the actual rebellion itself on Ireland’s national identity. Therefore, he seeks
to trace the significance of the Rising through culture.3 This thesis study also seeks to
examine the cultural implications of the Rising, but through different means. While
Moran investigates “dramatic representations of the Dublin revolt” and the constituent
“issues of sex, gender, and reproduction,” the texts he examines are comprised of
characters and plots taken from the mind of the playwright as inspired by the Rising
(Moran 5). My study explores representations of the Easter Rising put forth in
Singatories as performances of cultural memory, history and trauma and does so by
examining this commemorative performance which has its basis in historical figures and
accounts. Moran does dedicate one chapter of his book, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916
as Theatre, to a discussion of the performativity and theatricality of the 1935
commemoration but, again, in pursuit of a gendered analysis.
3 Moran examines The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey, Dreaming of the Bones by W.B. Yeats.
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Thompson and Kiberd conduct valuable, in-depth analysis of the Irish archive (to
use Diana Taylor’s terminology); the type of cultural memory that is recorded in tangible
(as opposed to ephemeral) materials. Taylor writes that “Archival memory exists in
documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films,
CD’s, all those items supposedly resistant to change” (19). There is, as Taylor observes,
another way of understanding and transmitting culture which she terms “the repertoire”
(20). The repertoire encompasses knowledge that is passed by way of “embodied
memory,” for example, “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in
short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral” (20). Taylor’s delineation between
these two modes of transmitting knowledge, archive and repertoire, is, for her, a tool for a
deepening understanding of culture and performance in South America. However, these
definitions and the principles that flow from them are equally useful in examining culture
and performance in Ireland. Ireland, like the nations of South America, is a post-colonial
state, which, during the colonial period, was regularly suppressed by a foreign ruling
power that sought to replace the native language, customs, and culture.
The archive/repertoire dialectic provides a theoretical perspective from which to
approach the Rising itself, but becomes even more useful when discussing the subsequent
representations and commemorations of the Easter Rising, as they often contain elements
of both archival record and performative expression. Taking a cue from Moran’s work,
this paper shall be more concerned with the continuing significance of the Rising in Irish
culture and the cultural imagination as expressed in the performance of Signatories. It is
in the performed repetitions of the event, the reverberations of historical fact and
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historical fiction, that this analysis finds the intersections of archival memory and
embodied repertoire.
The dialogue between the historical event of the Easter Rising and the
commemorative performance project, Signatories, engages with a unique space on the
spectrum of archive/repertoire. The subsequent and continued embodied practice of
commemorating that event over a century constitutes a performative mode of knowledge
transfer. The monologues that constitute the play, Signatories, each incorporate some
traces of historical archive through narrative tradition, physical objects, and space.
Therefore, while the play does not stand in for any historical record, the performance of
historical fact, artifact, and space in the monologues allows them to access the in-between
of archive and repertoire, where the collective Irish imagination of the Rising is made
known. Chapter One of this project addresses the ways that cultural narratives, preserved
through linguistic imagery, are performed in Signatories and other pertinent
commemorations. These enduring narratives reveal patterns of imagining, understanding,
and replication of Irish history and culture. Chapter Two discusses the performance of
artifacts (including objects and documents) and the way these more traditional archival
materials interact with the live performance of the monologues. In some cases, the
presence of these objects is imaginary and in others specific objects that can be proven to
have belonged to the signatories appear and transmit information. These artifacts foster
an embodied semiotics that allows for consideration of how memory and history can be
preserved and imagined through the handling of archival materials. Chapter Three
explores the performativity of spaces that appear in the language and imagination of the
characters and the transformation of these spaces from real to imaginary and back again.
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The spaces themselves embody and perform histories as well as the movements that
occur around and within them, movements that I will refer to as choreography. The site-
specific element, the staging of Signatories at Kilmainham Gaol, is also considered.
Taking Thompson as a model, I expand his assertions about the literary
imagination which enabled the Rising to occur to include a performative analysis of the
cultural and historical instances of the rebellion which arise in this play and what the
performance of an archive/repertoire dialectic reveals about the national identity in
Ireland and the ways in which it was formed. The monologues of Signatories incorporate
historical information drawn from archival material (documents, records, photographs,
etc.) and yet fill in the gaps with imagined memories, experiences, and cultural
mythology drawn from the repertoire, simultaneously creating a new archival article, the
text, while transmitting embodied knowledge through the performance. Signatories falls
somewhere in the in-between, of archive and repertoire. This in-between space is akin to
dream, where it is hard to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined, where
space, time, and identity are fluid, where images constructed from lived experiences
mingle with images of hope, terror, and subconscious sensations not yet realized.
I contend that these monologues in performance engage in conversation with the
performativity of other commemorative acts and with the Rising itself. The resulting
dialogue interweaves archive and repertoire and creates a window into the collective
cultural dreamscape where the past, present, and future can coexist as fluid performative
expressions of the nation’s history and trauma. Edward Said writes that narratives, like
the ones woven together in Signatories, “become the method colonized people use to
assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (xii). The tradition of
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Irish storytelling as cultural narrative is well established and continues on in this
commemorative theatrical production. The relationship between the Rising, the
Centenary, and Signatories creates this dreamscape where the imagined legacy of, not
only the signatories themselves, but the Rising as it has developed in Irish popular culture
through time, can simultaneously be constructed and critiqued. The relationship between
Signatories, the centenary, and the Rising of 1916 is fraught with ghosts, both past and
present. The event and its commemoration through the performative imaginary are
haunted by centuries of colonialism, cultural and linguistic annihilation, Gaelic revival
mythologies, the literary works of the signatories themselves, and images in photographs
and art which have become embedded in cultural representations of the Rising. The
relationship between the intertwining cultural instances of the Rising that are examined
here must also contend with ghosts of the more recent past such as the Troubles in
Northern Ireland, the country’s recent treatment of refugees, and the controversy of the
Northern Irish border post-Brexit. These traumas express themselves as ghosts, mostly
invisible and yet palpably felt spirits which shade the performances to be examined here.
In Paul Connerton’s discussions on the formation of histories within specific
societies, he proposes that sociocultural histories are constructed either as narratives that
legitimate the current status quo, or “narrative[s] of mourning” (Spirit of Mourning,
Connerton, 12). These “histories of mourning” occur “in the absence of bereavement
customs…in order to cope with an otherwise uncontainable experience of loss” (17). The
concept of a history constructed out of the spirit of mourning is crucial to understanding
the, at times, imagined (at times, revisionist) performative representations of the Easter
Rising. The “spirit of mourning,” therefore, can be understood as a ghost – that which
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haunts the construction and representation of this historical event throughout the last
century. Ghosts can also be understood as those cultural memories expressed through the
repertoire. The organizers of the 1916 rebellion were all too aware of the ghosts that
prompted their performance. After all, the Easter Proclamation begins by summoning
ghostly spirits, claiming to speak on their behalf. The first line begins, “In the name of
God and of the dead generations4” (Pearse, Easter Proclamation, emphasis mine).
Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine will provide a
framework for approaching all aspects of this analysis but chapter five, “The Haunted
House,” will be particularly appropriate for examining the site-specific staging in
Kilmainham Gaol as well as the public spaces referenced in various monologues of
Signatories. As the title suggests, Carlson’s work deals with the ghosts that manifest in
theatrical production through memory, making it particularly appropriate for this
investigation. Space plays a key role in the performative modes of the Rising to be
examined here– the historical event and Signatories. The “stages” chosen for these events
have as much to say about the repertoire as the embodied performances that take place
within them and, as such, must be taken into account when examining events as
performance.
In keeping with the balance between archive and repertoire, archival historical
documents and photographs are used to contextualize the 1916 Rising and the centenary
commemoration. Writings of the signatories will be utilized to contrast the memory of
these figures with the realities of their convictions and contributions, and the performance
of their accepted cultural legacies. External texts used by the playwrights within the
4 See Appendix i: pp. 75
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monologues of Signatories such as songs, poems, and historical documents, will serve as
evidence of the larger themes of memory, trauma, history, performance, archive, and
repertoire. Before continuing on, it is necessary to define these crucial terms as they
pertain to this paper.
Memory and History
The concept of memory will most often be used to describe collective cultural
memory, those things which Ireland has chosen consciously or unconsciously to record as
history. This definition of memory relates to Taylor’s concept of the repertoire and
Connerton’s concept of histories of mourning. According to Connerton, these histories
are constructed in order to reason through a socio-culturally shared trauma. This study is
interested in the production of memorialized cultural images, narratives, ideas, and
performances of the Easter Rising of 1916 as they relate to formation and proliferation of
Irish national identity. When memory, and its symbiotic partner, forgetting, produce an
incomplete product, ghosts are born. Ghosts, in this case, can be understood as those
lingering memories that have somewhat lost their shape but continue to be transmitted in
some form. They are the traces of half-forgotten or perhaps mis-remembered history that
remain. In this case, the pertinent ghosts (literary, dramaturgical, and embodied) haunt
the performative expressions of the Rising.
Trauma
Connerton’s work, again, provides useful definition here. He refers to historical
and cultural traumas as “those large-scale events so widely recurrent in the histories of
peoples that pose questions of identity and call for ways of coming to terms with the
losses they impose and the legacy they leave (17, Spirit of Mourning) It is trauma which
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causes the mourning to be expressed through the construction of a history. Trauma is that
which causes a rupture, an upsetting of the status quo, and which may cause fractures in
time, memory, or identity. Ruptures of this nature, especially when experienced on a
national or other collective scale, often produce ghosts. That is to say, trauma lingers in
the memory, haunts the body and body politic with traces of the unresolved pain or loss.
It is cyclical in nature, causing relentless repetitions (or in this case, memorials and
reenactments) yet, because of the social nature of the traumas examined in this study, the
cycles are performed, and therefore can never manifest in exactly the same way ever
again, “even though in some instances the ‘constancy of transmission’ across many
generations may be ‘astonishing’(Hymes)” (Roach iii). Traces of the historic rupture that
was the Easter Rising can be found throughout Signatories and throughout Irish culture,
appearing in narrative, embodied, inanimate, and spatialized forms.
Performance
This thesis will consider performance in several different incarnations. Artistic
performance, political performance, the performance of everyday life, performance of
identity, performance of nation, performativity of space and language – all these are
important to the present study. Therefore, performance will be considered in its broadest
most encompassing form. As I am concerned with the way that the Easter Rising has
been remembered and represented in Irish culture, Joseph Roach’s definition of
performance is appropriate:
The social processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may
be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites,
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from carnivals to the invisible rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense
means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit. (Cities of the Dead, i)
This definition is complementary to Taylor’s definition of performance as epistemology
(Taylor 3). Performance can be the embodied expression of archive and repertoire, but is
not necessarily embodied by living beings. Roach’s understanding of effigies helps to
understand the ways that the even in the absence of the living body, a human body is still
able to be performed. Signifiers of specific bodies which Roach calls “effigies” are able
to be transmitted through actors’ surrogate bodies (and other mediums). I argue that
objects can also perform this transmission of human signifiers through surrogation. As
Garner notes, words and objects can perform and are relevant as phenomenal articles,
capable of transmitting meaning, memory, and history (Garner 46).
Space
The streets of Dublin, the GPO, Kilmainham Gaol – considering these (and other)
spaces associated with the Easter Rising as both containers and dispensers of meaning
and memory is integral to understanding the performances that have taken place within
them. Any space can be a theatrical space so long as there is a performer and someone to
watch him and “theatre spaces…are deeply involved with the preservation and
configuration of cultural memory” (Carlson 131-2). Performance spaces, public spaces,
and public spaces as performance spaces will, therefore, be inspected as sites imbued
with phenomenological significance as they relate to the memory and imagined history
portrayed in Signatories. The body will also be investigated as phenomenological space,
as a physical retainer and dispenser of meaning and of personal and collective histories.
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This study is unique in its focus on the intersections of archive and repertoire in
the commemorative representation of the Easter Rising of 1916, particularly the UCD
commissioned play, Signatories, and the ways in which these intersections open a
performative space for retelling, interrogating, and imagining national traumas, old and
new. Though this thesis will examine the theatrical relationships between a significant
historical event and the subsequent commemorations in Ireland, it is my hope that other
scholars will investigate the assertion that the performative imaginary is a crucial element
of performing national memory and trauma, particularly in times of war, in countries
around the globe. There are several possibilities footnoted in the conclusion. The
conclusion will place Signatories in the larger realm of centenary commemoration,
allowing for reflection on the public response to the commemoration of the Rising at the
hundred-year mark. The other commemorative events allow for a broader perspective of
the imagined details of the Easter Rising, within and without the theater, as expressions
of the in-between of archive and repertoire where cultural traumas and legacies (both real
and desired) can be understood as collective cultural dreamscape.
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Chapter One
The Echoing Voice, The Lingering Face:
Traces of Cultural Narratives and Images from 1916 in 2016
Beginnings are difficult. In fact, it is hard to say whether beginnings exist at all5.
In Ireland, history, literature, and art all possess a sense of what has come before. The
Easter Rising was not the first armed uprising in Ireland’s history, so the birth of the
Rising was already imbued with many meanings, associated with many cultural images,
and possessed of haunted imaginary even before it began. The most recent rebellion to
the Easter Rising in 1916 was the Fenian Rising of 1867. The Fenian Rising grew from
the Fenian movement6 which believed in taking Ireland’s independence by force. The
1867 uprising also proposed a provisional government by way of public proclamation, an
action directly re-performed by the Easter Rising in 1916. The Easter Rising was also
haunted by the failure of the 1867 insurrection which was ill planned and ill equipped to
obtain the aims of its proclamation. This chapter considers the narratives, whether
perpetuated in image or language, which have become part of Ireland’s cultural
mythology surrounding the 1916 Easter Rising. The various writers of Signatories
incorporated trace elements of these narratives, thereby continuing their performance and
existence in culture and embodying them anew. This melding of historical fact and
commemorative fiction accesses the cultural dreamscape by re/presenting the familiar
5 See Paul Connerton’s analysis of the problematics of “beginning” in How Societies Remember, 6. 6 Militant Irish Nationalism prominent in the 1860’s. Secret societies of Fenians existed in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and Ireland. Prominent ideology behind the Fenian Rising of 1867 in Ireland.
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images of the Irish cultural repertoire alongside the strange imaginings of contemporary
writers.
Humans are narrative beings, relying on narrative to make sense of events,
circumstances, and identities. It is possible for a child to think that she “remembers” her
first birthday, when in fact, she is recalling the image in a photograph which has been
inscribed in her memory – not the actual experience of the event. But these facts are
irrelevant to the formation of memory. Additionally, it is possible to tell a story so many
times, embellishing a little each time, perhaps, that the inscription is so strong, it ceases
to be distinguishable from the original event. Researchers in perceptual psychology have
“concluded that a human subject not only organizes his or her perceptions on the basis of
logical and objective criteria, but also by translating remembered experience into
narrative” (Boss Recovering Memory, 22). This narrativizing occurs in the public cultural
realm as well. Images reoccur because they fit with the already established narrative.
These images and narrative identities appear without being summoned, as if they had
always been lurking below the surface.
There is an element of haunting in Irish cultural memories, images, and
narratives. The haunting of the blood sacrifice narrative, for example, is pervasive
throughout the Irish cultural archive and repertoire, beginning with the deeply rooted
belief of Catholicism that the sins of humanity could only be redeemed through the blood
sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Catholicism itself haunts the memory and performance of the
Rising because nationalism and Catholicism have traditionally been linked, most notably
through the legacy of Padraig Pearse and his ideology. Haunting, here, signifies two
different significant occurrences of blood sacrifice in Irish culture. First, haunting in the
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more pedestrian sense – something that will not go away, something that lingers, which is
always both strange and familiar. This definition describes the role of blood sacrifice in
an active role in the cultural imagination. It is the entity/idea/doctrine which is never able
to be put to rest. Secondly, haunting occurs in a socio-cultural context, wherein “things
are not in their assigned places…when something different from before, seems like it
must be done” (Gordon xvi). In this second definition, blood sacrifice is in the passive
position as the prescribed response to haunting social and cultural traumas in Ireland’s
history. These two modes of haunting (active and passive) exist in other Irish cultural
narratives and images as well.
It only takes “a few chosen symbols and simple ideas” to take “random people”
and create a nation justified by a “highly-edited version of their history” (Kiberd 140).
The symbols associated with Padraig Pearse and his role in the Easter Rising are some of
the most potent symbols of patriotism represented in the archive of the event. Pearse,
more than any of the other signatories, is most noted for advocating a violent rebellion.
The narrative of Pearse as a passionate, violent nationalist, obsessed by the idea of dying
for the freedom of his country has perpetuated throughout the last century.
{Lights up on a Pearse, dressed in his Volunteer uniform, seated at a small wooden desk.
On the desk, a small stack of papers and a crucifix. He peers out over the audience as
they gather around him. Does he see them? Perhaps, perhaps not. He looks down at his
desk. He lifts his eyes and speaks to himself as if into a mirror.}
18
For the Signatories project, Thomas Kilroy, an accomplished writer of plays,
novels, and academic work, gave voice to Pearse7, who is perhaps the most mythologized
of any of the signatories. Kilroy’s representation of Pearse capitalizes on the cultural
narrative of Pearse as a passionate and dramatic man with a desperate need to be
remembered as a hero of Irish nationalism. He alternates between talking to himself and
out over the audience, though there is never a strong sense of direct address to the
spectators8. The tone of his monologue shifts from fiery outburst to solemn
contemplation, not unlike the descriptions of him in his speeches versus his literary work.
Irwin Thompson writes that Pearse was “A deeply divided man,” and Kilroy’s script
echoes this conviction. The monologue opens with the performance of this divided
identity as PEARSE says to himself, “I don’t like you, Pearse…My pathetic otherness,
my weakling half” (Thompson 71, Kilroy 19). The first lines perform the mythology of
Pearse’s distaste for the English language, which has some basis in reality. His father
being an Englishman, Padraig inherited English blood, expressed in his surname – his
“otherness,” his “weakling half.”
The narrative of Pearse wrestling between dual identities is deeply imbedded in
the cultural repertoire via performed representations of his character, including in a play
he published in 1913, The Singer, in which a man named MacDara who has strong
revolutionary convictions but spends many years in hiding out of fear of being arrested,
only to return when the country needs him most to sacrifice himself for the restoration of
7 For convenience, when discussing the historical figures, last names will be written in normative capitalizations, ie. “Pearse,” and the figures as characterized in Signatories specifically will be in all caps, i.e. PEARSE. 8 As seen in video footage provided by UCD.
19
Ireland’s freedom. When the PEARSE of Signatories says to himself, “Always trying to
hide, you were, hiding behind Mother’s skirts. Not anymore. No more hiding,” he
expresses the desire to come out of hiding, much like MacDara does in the play written
by Pearse (Kilroy 20). But the dichotomy of hero and coward is expressed in the Irish
archive as well. Therefore, the image of Pearse in the cultural imagination is dependent
upon this sense of incompleteness, an in-betweenness, and a consuming desire to belong.
In a letter written to himself, Pearse describes a dialectic of two personas:
I imagine that there are two Pearses, one a cheerless, wintry person and the other
pleasant, calm and serene. The calm serene person is seen all too seldom. On
public platforms and in Sgoil Éanna he is most often seen. The dull cheerless
person is frequently to be seen. He is not a pleasant type. I do not like him. I grow
chill when I see him. The funny aspect of this is that I am not sure which is the
real Pearse, the gloomy or the bright one. (qtd. in McNulty 6)
Kilroy’s PEARSE performs this archival document and its sentiments as he declares,
“Never liked you [Pearse]. Does everyone have a failed weakling like that inside him?
That has to be – eliminated? Actually, I don’t think anyone likes you” (Kilroy 19).
Smartly, yet not surprisingly, Kilroy links the cultural mythology of Pearse’s dual nature
to the need to be purified of the weaker half. This is unsurprising because Pearse, perhaps
more than any of the other signatories was haunted by the culturally embedded belief in
the redeeming power of blood sacrifice. The ghost of the blood sacrifice clung to Pearse’s
thinking during his life and followed him powerfully into the Irish ethos after his death.
In the active mode, blood sacrifice is most prominently related to the sacrifice of
Christ, the example (which of course has archival and repertory expressions) that Pearse
20
connected himself with in his nationalistic endeavors. His literary works and political
rhetoric attest to his desire for bloodshed in the name of a free Ireland and much of his
writing employs religious imagery to this end. He was convinced that only a blood
sacrifice could awaken the nation to cast off foreign rule once and for all. In a speech
made in 1916 at the school he founded, St. Enda’s, he declared, “As it took the blood of
the Son of God to redeem the world, so it would take the blood of Irishmen to redeem
Ireland” (Pearse Collected political writings, 98). Pearse likens the performance of
violent sacrifice to the Passion of Christ. Pearse and his contemporaries appropriated
religious images and gestures, performing sacrifice that resonated with the repertoire so
deeply that the images of the rebels and the images of Christ became linked, such that
patriotism became synonymous with holiness (Kiberd 211). For Pearse specifically,
martyrdom, if he could successfully embody it, would purify him of his hybridity by
making him an Irish hero and endowing him with the same glory as the martyrs before
him.
The PEARSE of Signatories performs the association between Pearse and
martyrdom very explicitly when PEARSE declares his plan for ridding himself of his
weakling half:
Namby pamby, weakling…afraid of your own shadow – but I am rising above
you, you hear – I will leave you behind me as I prepare – prepare myself for the
final heroic – that’s what’s so interesting. It’s all so simple. Cleansed myself of all
my weakness. Just like that. Passed through the flame of purification. I’m ready
now. (Kilroy 21)
21
This declaration is an expression of personal insecurity surrounding identity and Irishness
as well as Pearse’s desire to seek transcendence through a Christ-like sacrifice of his
mortal body. Kilroy notes in an interview with the London Daily Mail that this process of
purification is also about PEARSE facing down death without knowing what his legacy
will be. The repertoire portrays Pearse as a man who desired nothing more than to die for
Ireland so that the nation might resurrect to new life as a free nation. But in the dreamlike
contemplation of PEARSE as he appears in Signatories, Kilroy allows the audience to
question whether Pearse’s blood sacrifice was for Ireland’s purification or for his own
personal justification. Kilroy interrogates the sanitized, valorized image of Pearse as he
has been represented in the repertoire. This questioning is only available to him through
the space of performance because the PEARSE of Signatories can be seen in both the
active and passive modes of haunting. The character cannot escape being haunted by the
associations of prior performances of Pearse, his identity, and his legacy. But Kilroy’s
PEARSE is also an expression of haunting in the passive mode in that he is the response
to a question, a “something to be done” – what does it mean to be Irish and what does it
take to become a nation?
Unlike Padraig Pearse, Thomas Clarke was not a poet or playwright. Clarke was
the most militarily minded of the signatories, a veteran of Irish revolutionary action on
several fronts and the “embodiment of fenianism9” (O’Hegarty xiii). Playwright Rachel
Fehily imagined the final moments in Clarke’s cell as being charged with victory. One of
the most persistent cultural narratives surrounding the Rising is that it was a victory of
ideas even if militarily it was a failure. Fehily’s rendition of Clarke draws attention to the
9 See previous footnote (4)
22
cultural haunting under a different title: legacy. CLARKE performs the victory of ideas in
touting his legacy as “a legacy for the soul of Ireland,” not necessarily the land or civic
freedom (Fehily 72). Like PEARSE, CLARKE views his death as a necessary and
welcome part of the cycle of Ireland’s independence. “I would rather have died in battle,”
CLARKE says, “ – but there is some decency in this end. And the end of all of us will be
no ending for the English. It will be Ireland’s beginning” (Fehily 64). CLARKE,
therefore, participates in the performance of freedom as necessitated by death.
{Thomas Clarke, seated in a chair with his arm in a sling, begins singing. The audience
gathers around him on all sides, looking up at him on the raised platform where he sits.
He is in jail but he addresses the audience directly.}
The most powerful thing about the monologue is not the way it performs the
imagination of Clarke’s personal character, but how it performs the politics of historical
events – those connected to the Rising and even beyond into more recent history. The
power of this performance to weave together past and present lies in the “strange mixing
of generations: of the dead generations of the Proclamation and its authors, and of the
living generations of the audience” (Mason xvii). The modern audience at a performance
of Signatories not only has the cultural memories of the Rising, but also of all the history
that has come since. The context encompasses traumas that Thomas Clarke would not
have in mind in 1916, but which THOMAS CLARKE is very much aware of.
CLARKE’s monologue exemplifies the transformation of the archive and repertoire as
they continue to be molded and remolded by time and circumstance. Therefore,
23
CLARKE’s assertions about the “future” are simultaneously prophetic and reflective, as
the audience of 2016 has already experienced the future he is forecasting in the
performance of 1916.
The war to free the whole island will be short and savage. Brothers who fall out
with each other are more ferocious than animals…As soon as its over we’ll live
together in a magnificent new united Ireland where men and women work side by
side…our citizens exist together in harmony, all are valued equally whatever their
religion and the strong look out for the weak. (Fehily 65)
The war for independence that followed the Rising (1919-1921) was relatively short and
certainly savage, but it did not free the whole island and instead of unity, a divided
Ireland emerged on fronts geographic, ideological, and religious. Therefore, CLARKE
embodies more than just the imagined memory of Thomas Clarke, but also the cultural
memory of Ireland’s historical pursuit of independence, successes and failures. CLARKE
is eerily haunted by a future that Thomas Clarke would not have foreseen, but which the
audience of 2016 feels as a collective traumatic memory. For the modern audience, the
monologue evokes the history of the extreme violence of the war of independence, the
subsequent civil war between two nationalist factions – those for and against the treaty
with Britain10 - and even the violence of the Troubles11 in Northern Ireland (1968-1998).
10 The Anglo-Irish treaty ended the war for Ireland’s independence. It was controversial because, while it established the Irish Free State, Ireland remained a dominion of the UK and prescribed an oath of allegiance to the British crown. It also split Ireland into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, which remained under British rule. The treaty was ratified but the rift created between pro and anti-treaty members of the IRA sparked a civil war in the brand new state. 11 The Troubles (1968-1998): 30 year conflict between pro-unionists and republican nationalists in Northern Ireland, marked by violence and terrorism.
24
The violence of the Rising was an embodiment of the unfulfilled mourning of past
uprisings, just as the violence of the Irish civil war was the embodiment of the failure to
1. Achieve the ideological aims of the Proclamations and 2. To properly mourn the
painful division of the land and its people. In an article for the Irish Times, philosophy
professor Richard Kearney writes about the politics of contested commemorations, such
as that of the Rising centenary12. He writes:
As for those who stayed at home and died in the Rising, there were official State
commemorations by the new Ireland, but these quickly became canonizations of a
few national martyrs, whose sacrificial glory meant that ordinary civilian
casualties, including women and children, went largely unmourned. Those caught
in the crossfire were easily forgotten. (Kearney)
The surviving nationalists who still had their sights set on a republic knew that the war
was not over. The consolidating of honored casualties to just a few martyrs served to
place the focus on the swift brutality exhibited by the British in their execution of Rising
leaders and pulled focus away from the tragic death of civilians. The bodies of the
signatories were not returned to their families for burial, thereby interrupting the natural
process of grief by their families and supporters.
The absence of the signatories’ bodies also abstracts the loss of their lives and by
abstracting the loss of life, the nexus of mourning became a collective mourning of the
loss of ideals not life, the failure of the rebellion not its casualties. Foot soldiers and
civilians, therefore, were passed over in the making of nationalist symbols and these
12 Kearney’s essay explores the ways in which the commemorations of Easter 1916 and the Battle of the Somme (1916) are connected and should, for the sake of healing, be equally accepted and coexist in the national memory.
25
deaths came to be understood as casualties of a greater war – the war against Britain for
independence. In other words, the few men (most of them signatories) who were exalted
as martyrs came to embody the loss of all lives during Easter week. In keeping with the
grand tradition of performance, the signatories stand in as surrogate bodies, performing
the loss of all lives during the insurrection. Much as an actor embodies – is possessed by
– a character, the martyrs embody the ghosts of the casualties that went unmourned by
the collective nation. In Kearney’s statement on the Rising, the twin faculties necessary
for the forging of a collective history, memory and forgetting, are again, seen side by
side. The Rising is retold in commemorative ceremonies and dramas, like Signatories and
so many others, again and again in an attempt at exorcising the ghost of what has been
forgotten but which is, nonetheless, still there.
Through CLARKE, Rachel Feehily attempts to perform the unseen casualties and
acknowledge their role in the event. CLARKE mentions the men and women (unnamed)
who served with him in the GPO. But it is the voice of a stranger that interjects to bring
the pain of those unnamed dead to the fore. CLARKE describes an old woman who spits
at him and other soldiers as they march towards Richmond Barracks where they will be
held for trial. She shouts to them, “‘May you burn in hell for killing innocent little
children!’” (Feehily 65). Her language conjures a vivid and tragic image in the minds of
the audience and although CLARKE points the finger at the British for these casualties,
they are still brought into the view of the audience where they must be acknowledged. In
the moment that he reenacts the confrontation he embodies both those who have died and
those who have been left behind.
26
Hugo Hamilton takes the most unique approach to the task of embodying the
signatories. In crafting a representation of James Connolly, Hamilton chooses to give
agency to a nameless young woman. The cultural dreamscape is more visible in this piece
because the performance speaks of Connolly in the third person, uninhibited by an
embodied representation of the man himself and is therefore the most removed from the
event of the Rising. Yet it is this distance which affords the character, and therefore the
audience, the imaginative space that an icon can come to inhabit simply through the
repertory performance of collective memory and forgetting. The monologue serves
several functions. First, it addresses directly the fictionalization and imagination of
memory itself, the power of a repeated narrative to erase certain details. The piece
performs, quite literally, the process of conversion from archive to repertoire as we see
the legacy of Connolly repeated, handed down through generations, memorialized
through media, and the ways that personal attachment to certain aspects of a character
can influence the legacy of that character in the public ethos.
{A stark white chair glows as the lights come up to reveal a young woman. Her hand
rests on the chair. She begins speaking to the audience. She moves about the raised
platform in her bell-bottom jeans and lavender turtleneck, with the audience all around
her.}
Hamilton’s monologue follows a young woman of Irish heritage who is living in
Birmingham, England. The character recounts to the audience a story from her childhood
in which her two sisters, Anne and Theresa, are almost kidnapped by a mysterious
27
couple. The sisters are saved by their Irish babysitter, Angela, who reared them on stories
and songs about James Connolly. From her dress in the performance of Signatories, the
young woman speaking Hamilton’s monologue speaks from some ambiguous time after
197013. The young woman speaks of Angela’s love and devotion for Connolly, though, as
she points out “he was long dead before Angela was born” (Hamilton 45). Throughout
the monologue, the young woman slips in and out of the story about the attempted
kidnapping and her life with Angela, alternating the narrative with history about
Connolly, presumably taught to her by Angela. Hamilton uses this fluid dream space
where history, narrative, memory, and trauma mingle to interrogate Connolly’s legacy
and even more so, the process of its formation and reformation over time.
The personal story told by the young woman performs the precarious and
imaginative nature of memory. She frequently interrupts her story to say things like:
“That’s how I remember it” and “I have a clear memory of this happening,” as if to both
qualify and validate her story (33 & 39; 33). The incident is described in detail, down to
the color of the coat (red) on the woman who is attempting to take Theresa away, yet, the
storyteller says, “And the whole thing was happening in silence, that’s my memory – no
sound, no shouting” (36, emphasis mine). The monologue performs the way that certain
images and details dominate memories, forcing the forgetting of other important details.
Later, when she narrates the aftermath of the thwarted kidnapping, she says, “She
[Angela] told us the story of James Connolly, so we would forget. She promised to teach
us the song so we wouldn’t remember what happened, or what didn’t happen” (39). In the
wake of traumatic events, Hamilton argues, those in positions of power – even if their
13 Though this is not specified in the text, it is suggested in the costuming of the actress and the content of the monologue.
28
intentions are good – can force the forgetting of certain details in favor of more sanitized
or romantic narratives. These assertions about the fragility of memory allow the viewer to
both imagine and critique the legacy of James Connolly that is performed through the
young woman’s monologue.
The first information the monologue offers about Connolly concerns his execution.
The circumstances of Connolly’s execution provide great fodder for mythology. Having
been injured in the course of the Rising, Connolly was unable to stand. He was court
martialed in the Red Cross hospital at Dublin Castle on a stretcher and was executed
sitting down in a chair, “strapped to a chair,” Hamilton’s young woman tells the
audience. This information caused outrage at the time it happened and continued to
provide vivid images of British cruelty for nationalists who came after. Hamilton
constructs an oral history by staging Connolly’s execution through the memory a young
woman possesses from a memory her babysitter shared with her of an event that
happened before the babysitter was even born. The monologue is less about performing
archive into repertoire as it is about the structural mode of this occurrence in cultural
histories. The monologue critiques the way that a complex man who had strong
convictions and worked most of his life to improve life for the working poor can be
reduced to a few consolidated and largely sentimental cultural memories.
29
However, Hamilton does take care that his monologue performs some of Connolly’s
politics. The young woman describes the things that Angela’s imagined James Connolly
was angry about.
…capitalism and inequality and injustice, and God was never much of a socialist,
and the people of Ireland never getting their fair share of things, and women still
being the slaves of slaves. (36)
Connolly was a dedicated socialist, a labor organizer in Scotland and Ireland, and an
advocate for women’s suffrage and equality. The closing lines of the monologue perform
these ideals through song, mediated by time. Connolly himself wrote many political and
patriotic songs14 but Hamilton chooses instead to connect socialist politics with a very
different cultural icon: John Lennon. The young woman closes the monologue by singing
the song that Angela taught her, that she has referenced throughout her performance.
A working class hero is something to be. A working class hero is something to be. There’s room at the top, they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill. If you want to be like the folks on the hill. A working class hero is something to be. A working class hero is something to be. If you want to be a hero then just follow me. If you want to be a hero then just follow me. (Lennon qtd. in Hamilton 40) There is no evidence that Lennon wrote the song about Connolly, but Hamilton ties them
together in a very interesting way, such that anyone who witnessed the performance of
Signatories would have a hard time disassociating the song from Connolly. Through
14 See Connolly, James and Matthew Callahan. Songs of Freedom : The James Connolly Songbook. PM Press, 2013.
30
performance, the title of “working class hero” has become Connolly’s moniker to the
young woman and subsequently the audience of 2016.
What is performed most clearly in Hamilton’s rendition of Connolly is his
political relationship to women’s rights. First, by choosing to present Connolly’s legacy
as embodied by a woman, Hamilton acknowledges Connolly’s convictions about
women’s voices being heard in the outcome of history. In fact, Hamilton does not include
any men in the monologue besides Connolly, not even in the young woman’s
recollections of home. Only her mother, sisters, and female babysitter are mentioned.
The preservation of Connolly’s legacy by female voices comes directly from the archive.
A signed testimony from Connolly’s oldest daughter, Nora, and a memoir she published
in 1918 (at the age of 26), record the details of her father’s last moments. Hamilton even
takes words from Nora’s book and repeats them when recounting the tearful last
encounter between Connolly and his wife, Lillie.
“‘Lillie stop,’ he said to his wife, ‘you’ll unman me.’” (Signatories, Hamilton 39)
“… ‘Don’t cry, Lillie, you’ll unman me.’” (The Unbroken Tradition, Connolly
O’Brien, 184)
The monologue echoes Nora Connolly’s memoire and performs the memory of James
Connolly as being under the stewardship of women. The scene of Connolly’s last
interaction with his wife and daughter is much longer in Nora’s recollection and yet
Hamilton chooses this one line. The use of “unman” is what makes this line so
compelling and so ironic in the context of a monologue spoken by a woman about the
legacy of a man whose life was most famously recorded by his own daughter. Inserting
this archival phrase underlines role of the feminine voice in remembering Connolly.
31
The transmission of memories of James Connolly, woman to woman, is already
significant, but Hamilton takes cultural imagination beyond physical borders of nation.
The young woman who speaks the history says of her national identity: “We were born in
England. But we were Irish” (34). Angela, she tells us, is also Irish, having come from
Dublin. What is seen quite clearly through this construction is the discursive model of
cultural transmission through emigration and diaspora. Connolly was from a similar
situation. He was born in Scotland to Irish parents and he professed Irish as his national
identity. Hamilton reaches out to the Irish diaspora community and performs what
Irishness abroad might look like. The Connolly represented in the story of the young
woman not only performs James Connolly of 1916 to an audience in 2016, but also the
memory of James Connolly in the mind of a mid-century, Irish diaspora, woman. The
mobility of memories across time and space, in this case, lends the performance a sense
of abstractness. The cultural image of James Connolly, like any other memory –
collective or personal – is subject to time and place.
The characters of Signatories embody a century’s worth of ghosts. In those
portrayals that attempt to integrate more historical fact and those that stage more
abstracted characters, there is no escaping cultural memories once they have reached
peak potency through refinement; a refinement that happens over time through the
telling, retelling, remembering and forgetting of memories. As Hugo Hamilton’s
monologue exemplifies, Connolly does not need to be represented as himself, one of his
contemporaries, or even a native Irishwoman, and still the most potent image of his last
days remains the same: he’s sitting in a chair being shot. The final image of the young
32
woman’s monologue is of her seated in a lone chair, singing her song for James
Connolly.
The Irish imagination continues to question the exact character of Padraig Pearse
– was he a hero of Irish nationalism or a champion of self-aggrandizement? Tom Clarke
reappears, 100 years on, as a valiant veteran of Irish revolutionary thinking, a determined
old Fenian whose character, as he appears in 2016, is haunted by every instance of
Ireland’s failure to live out the values of radical republican ideology. In the wake of the
trauma of the Easter Rising, Irishmen and Irishwomen began to consolidate their
memories, in order to forget and imagine a new future that was not tied to the violence
and tragedy of the insurrection. But the Rising was already haunted, already part of a
larger cultural narrative that necessitated a next step in the story that would make sense,
that would fit with the established images and associations. 100 years later, Ireland
continues to wrestle with the ghosts of Ireland past. There is something unfinished.
Richard Kearney writes, “the retrieval of unfinished stories invites us to transmute trauma
into drama so that unspoken pain may be converted into narrative healing” (A Year of
Double Remembrance, They Irish Times). The key players in the Rising appear again and
again in various expressions of the individual and cultural imagination because the vision
that the signatories set forth in the Easter Proclamation, the Ireland they were fighting to
build, has yet to come to pass. The nation continues to attempt transformation from
trauma to drama so that the narratives of the past which appear in the present might heal
and become integrated with the narratives of a new radically imaginary future for Ireland.
33
Chapter Two
Something You Can Touch: Objects and Artifacts from 1916 in 2016
Material objects and documents have the power to shape collective memory and
history by their seeming permanence in the archive. However, artifacts, just like oral
histories, are subject to reinterpretation. The Easter Proclamation, for example, exists in
the “archive.” The wording of the document has not changed and yet, the meaning shifts
when set against the passage of time or when placed in a context other than the one from
which it originated. The same is true of material objects in the archive and in
performance. As Diana Taylor notes, “What changes over time is the value, relevance, or
meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied”
(Archive & Repertoire 19). The materials referenced, represented, and embodied in
Signatories belong to the greater cultural archive as well as the specific archive
associated with the history of the Rising. In this theatrical realm, props/objects serve
many different functions. They exist in two simultaneous fields of experience wherein an
object, such as a drinking glass “becomes both a spectatorial object and object of
handling for the performer” (Garner 46). Objects can situate a performance or character
temporally. Objects can locate a performance or character physically. Objects also have
the ability to perform affiliations, relationships, and numerous other aspects of a
performance experience.
The audience enters Kilmainham Gaol. Before the first performer is seen, copies
of the Easter Proclamation rain down from the upper decks of the prison, floating through
the air. As the words of the Proclamation literally gather in the hands and at the feet of
the audience, they connect 1916 to 2016 in a tactile and experiential way. The use and
34
reference of historical and cultural artifacts throughout Signatories serves to connect the
imagined thoughts, feelings, and stories of the characters to specific historical and
cultural associations. Thus, in the performance of Signatories, these historical materials
exist as both real and imaginary, both relics of the past and subjects of the present,
performing in a fluid and dynamic space of both the archive and repertoire. These
objects, photographs, documents, and other media occupy a mythic space in the
collective memory of the Rising in Ireland as well as its representation.
Eamonn Ceannt came to the revolution through the Gaelic League and a love of
Gaelic culture. He was an accomplished player of a traditional Gaelic instrument, the
uilleann pipes, and a fluent Irish speaker. Playwright Frank McGuinness wrote the
monologue spoken by Ceannt’s imagined character. McGuinness takes a more abstract
approach to the last words of CEANNT yet manages to weave a significant amount of
the historical archive into the performance. Not only do the objects that CEANNT
handles come from historical record, but in McGuinness’s representation, they come
alive, with voice and agency of their own. It is as if history itself is speaking through the
character’s body, the man a mere vessel for object agency.
{The uillean pipes echo through the drafty east wing of Kilmainham Gaol. Éamonn
Ceannt sits at a desk, looking thoughtfully down at his hands. The pipes stop there song,
Ceannt opens his hands and drops a stack of coins from one hand to the other. He opens
his mouth and speaks to the audience.}
35
McGuinness constructs a time and place that is highly dreamlike, in which CEANNT
does not know definitively where he is physically or temporally. The first clue to this in-
betweenness of time comes in the first lines and stage directions of the piece:
It’s time to pay the piper as they say. Which coin shall I use? Should it be those that I
first earned playing? A shining sixpence? A bright shilling? Why can’t I recall? What
is happening to me? Did I ever think that I would not remember the exact sum? Did
it not seem, once upon a time, a vast fortune, my first pay packet? (He counts out
onto the table a few coins, neatly piling them. These coins may be of his time, or our
time. They may be a mixture of both). (McGuinness 48)
CEANNT expresses a lack of clarity in the memory of his first paid performance of the
uilleann pipes, something he thought he would always remember. He names the coins,
the various currency that the sum might have been; yet he cannot remember. This lack of
remembrance prompts him to take the physical objects in hand, to place them in view as
tokens of the memory that he cannot quite place. In the stage directions, McGuinness
plays with the representation of time. The use of coins from various periods of history
connects CEANNT to the past and the present, as if his story is playing out in the present
and not as a ghost of the past. The coins perform a sense of memorial confusion, at once
connecting CEANNT to 1916 and placing him in 2016. The coins continue their
performance as political objects. CEANNT makes a bet on the flip of a coin saying,
“Heads come up, Ireland wins the day,” but upon closer inspection realizes that the
head’s side of the coin bears “the face of England’s king” and he decides he “better settle
for tails” (McGuinness 48). The coin embodies the political reality of 1916 – the rule of
England – and performs England’s influence over Irish culture.
36
The objects that appear after the coins are most complex and most fluidly located
between archive and repertoire. CEANNT produces a gold watch on a silver chain and
“moves it slowly to and fro before his eyes” (McGuinness 51). The watch obviously
evokes the notion of time and the embodied passage of time, but the object also begins to
speak and as it speaks, the watch itself, performing the cultural understanding of time,
speaks as time itself. CEANNT’s exchange15 with the watch enacts a cultural dialogue
between Irish nationalism and time. The exchange is reproduced below.
This cell, what is it?
He holds the watch to his right ear.
He points to the watch.
This tells me it is my country. What does my country ask of me?
He holds the watch to his left ear.
He points to the watch.
This tells me to kill for it. And if I kill for it, would I die for it? (McGuinness 52).
As time personified, the watch transforms from a visual object to an aural one, capable of
answering CEANNT’s questions. The watch answers, now transformed into the character
of Time, and also counters Irish history. Only time can answer what constitutes a nation
and what it means to be a citizen of that nation. The definition of Irish identity under
examination in 1916, CEANNT and his watch suggest, may still be under dispute today.
The designation of the cell as CEANNT’s country carries eerie traces of the current
Brexit debate raging over the establishment of a physical border between Ireland and
15 For this reason, I will reproduce the dialogue and stage directions as they are formatted in the text. The formatting makes the sense of exchange clearer, just as the movement would in performance.
37
Northern Ireland16. The wounds of partition still linger in the body politic and the
establishment of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic evokes
anxieties that mimic those of being detained by the boundaries of a jail cell.
Upon his realization of approaching death, CEANNT reaches for one more object,
requesting that it enact some measure of protection. He reveals his black rosary beads to
the audience, asking “Shall these beads be my armour, deflecting the bullets my enemies
fire against me?” (McGuinness 54). A rosary is a material object used to enact a repertory
performance. The rosary prayers are memorized, passed on through tradition and
embodied practice. By calling on the rosary beads to perform his protection, CEANNT
summons generations of religious practice and actively connects Catholicism to the
performance of his identity as a rebel, a nationalist and an Irishman. The use of the rosary
as an active, performative object appears in other character monologues of Signatories17
and functions as one of the unbroken threads of the Rising’s complex history. In defining
Irishness, the nationalist movement had to find ways to differentiate Ireland from
England after centuries of Anglicanization. Catholicism remained the most profound
performance of a uniquely Irish (or at least non-English identity. The rosary literally
performs a prayer, as CEANNT’s fingers glide over the beads, he does not even need to
speak the words aloud – many in the audience will already know them.
16 Because Northern Ireland remains a part of Great Britain, they are included in Brexit. This has caused some politicians to consider instituting a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a proposition which has ignited old fears and resentments in both states about the partition of the land. See EU briefing for more information: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/583116/IPOL_BRI(2017)583116_EN.pdf 17 The rosary also appears in Marina Carr’s THOMAS MACDONAGH and Emma Donaghue’s ELIZABETH O’FARRELL.
38
The final object in CEANNT’s possession is the most precious of all, the key to
his Dublin home. The key and accompanying address serve to humanize Ceannt through
the imagined expression of his character. The object performs a location and the location
performs a reality, a tangible connection to the audience of 2016. The key and what it
expresses connects the imaginary CEANNT to the man who actually lived in Dublin in
1916, therefore performing his existence and memory. Home is a recurring theme in Irish
drama and the value placed on the home via the key performs not only CEANNT’s
personal connection to his home, but also the tradition of conceptions of home in the Irish
dramatic canon. In a highly poetic and sensitive way, McGuinness plays with the trope of
home and of ownership of the land so prevalent in Irish drama. CEANNT finishes his
monologue by kissing his key, showing it to the audience and reciting his address: “13
Alphonsus Road, Drumcondra, Dublin, Ireland” (McGuinness 55-56). The address is
found on Ceannt’s last letter to his wife and thus included in this monologue. The key
and the address it represents not only performs CEANNT’s love of home and the people
in it, but also the deep love of that home existing in Ireland. The land where his home
stands is the most valuable thing he can give to the next generation of Irishmen and
Irishwomen.
On a more practical level, CEANNT is aware that the objects in his possession
will serve as markers of his existence and mementos skilled in conjuring memories in his
absence. He does not ask what he can say or do to be remembered; instead he asks,
“What can I leave you to remember me, Éamonn Ceannt?” (55). The answer is straight
off the pages of the archive: “Only these. A watch. A chain. A rosary. A few shillings”
and “the key to [his] home” (55-56). In calling upon these objects as articles of
39
remembrance and by presenting them to the audience, McGuinness stages the literal
wishes of Éamonn Ceannt, recorded in a letter to the commandant of Kilmainham Gaol.
In this letter, Ceannt lists the items in his possession (cash, a watch, a chain, a rosary, and
a key) and asks that they be delivered to his wife. McGuinness’s CEANNT is the living
embodiment of this historical document. The archive is being transmitted through
performance and therefore being entered into the repertoire – repeatable sequence of
actions, gestures, and speech that enacts historical and cultural information.
Of all the gestures commemorated and transmitted through the repertoire about
the last days of the signatories who were executed, one action of Thomas MacDonagh
reappears consistently. This action, linked to an object, is represented in Marina Carr’s
portrayal of MacDonagh in the performance of Signatories. At the end of the monologue,
MACDONAGH performs this action, echoing the accounts already prominent in the Irish
cultural repertoire of the Rising.
I take out my silver cigarette case, offer them round, some shy away but
some accept and look at me in wonder. I give the remainder and the case
to the officer in charge. ‘I won’t be needing it,’ I say. ‘You’re a prince,
Mr. MacDonagh,’ he says and puts his hand on my shoulder and walks me
towards the sandbags. (Carr 101)
The story of MacDonagh offering cigarettes to the young soldiers tasked with his
execution is deeply imbedded in the cultural memory of the Rising. The cigarettes appear
in many folklore accounts of MacDonagh’s execution18. The generosity and charm
evoked by the offering of cigarettes has been elevated to mythological proportions. In the
18 At this time, I have found no archival source to corroborate this instance actually occurred.
40
case of Signatories, Carr follows this tradition. The cigarettes perform an ease, courage,
and charm that has stuck to the legacy of Thomas MacDonagh in the collective memory
of the Rising. The most powerful performance of the cigarettes is that they draw the
character of MacDonagh in the cultural imagination back into the mortal realm. The
offering of the cigarettes is deeply human in its simplicity and tangibility, serving to
make MacDonagh (and MACDONAGH) somewhat more accessible.
In Carr’s representation, the cigarettes create the perfect opportunity to integrate
another oft cited “memory” of MacDonagh’s death. After MacDonagh’s execution, a
poignant remark from a British officer became part of the repertoire of the Rising: They
all died well, but MacDonagh died like a prince. Whether these words were ever spoken
becomes irrelevant because performance through generational, political, social, and
dramatic storytelling has proliferated this remark and the moment it was spoken in the
Irish imagination. Carr participates in this performance tradition by integrating an
officer’s remark (‘You’re a prince, Mr. MacDonagh’). MACDONAGH, therefore,
actively reiterates the legends of 1916 in performance for a 2016 audience. Carr goes
even one step further in performing the bravery, heroism, and patriotism of MacDonagh
by including reference to another object, the blindfold used for executions.
MACDONAGH claims that if he were given the choice, he would refuse a blindfold
(Carr 98). The choice of this object not only performs the mythos of MacDonagh’s
personality and princeliness, but also exists in the in-between space of dream and history
where objects serve many functions at once. Irish folklore concerning the Rising typically
cites Thomas Clarke as the rebel who requested to face the firing squad without a
blindfold. By including this lore in the representation of MacDonagh, the monologue
41
raises questions about myths surrounding the signatories and asks the modern audience to
question and consider what kind of history becomes true because it is accepted versus
history that is accepted because it is true.
{A single chair on a platform. MacDonagh sits squarely, feet apart, hands on his knees,
as if gently holding himself up. His Volunteer uniform jacket is draped over the back of
his chair. He addresses the audience but speaks softly as if also speaking to himself. The
viewers surround him on all sides, leaning in against the platform.}
Carr includes two other objects which do exist tangibly in the archive.
Deliberately, these objects appear in physical form instead of linguistic representation, as
in the case of the cigarettes. MACDONAGH describes the moment that his sister Mary
brought him the family rosary on the night before his execution. The rosary exists and is
on permanent display at the Kilmainham Gaol Museum19. The rosary performs the
natural associations of Catholicism, and with it, ritual, and embodied practice. The beads
also provide a material artifact from 1916 to appear before the eyes of the 2016 audience,
connecting the witnesses of the drama to the object and its implications in the life of
Thomas MacDonagh, namely his faith journey and family. As the rosary is preserved as
an historical artifact, the monologue also makes active use of the archive, transferring the
history of the object into the embodied practice and memory of the repertoire. As
explored in the performance of ÉAMONN CEANNT, a rosary embodies memories and
19 Photograph and information about this artifact can be found at http://kilmainhamgaolmuseum.ie/collection/
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cultural practices on its own, acting as an agent of cultural transfer where prayers are
passed from generation to generation. The rosary MACDONAGH holds in his
performance is an heirloom in two modes. It transmits family history, as it belonged to
his mother, and it transmits cultural history, as it belongs to a tradition of religious
practice. Because the rosary is an active performing object, its appearance in the
monologue allows the audience to imagine what MacDonagh would have been doing and
saying in his final hours, because those behaviors are inscribed on the physical object
MACDONAGH holds.
In his final letter20 to his beloved wife, Muriel, MacDonagh wrote that he had
enclosed some pictures of his wife and children with the correspondence. These
photographs appear in Carr’s monologue, again, performing for the audience of
Signatories, while remaining connected to documented history that exists in the archive.
However, Carr takes a divergent approach to the letter that endures in the archive in her
representation of MACDONAGH’s attitude about his death. In the letter, MacDonagh
states that he has no regrets, that he knew that the action he took in orchestrating and
carrying out the Rising would cost him his life. He speaks of his honor and the enduring
legacy. “It is a great and glorious thing to die for Ireland,” he says (MacDonagh 3). He
shows little fear or weakness, except in his sorrow at leaving his wife behind. Yet, Carr
imagines a more pensive and concerned man. MACDONAGH tells the audience that he
wishes he would have stayed in Paris and asks himself, “What was I thinking? Certainly
not of them,” [his children] (Carr 97).
20 A copy of this letter, transcribed by Muriel MacDonagh and Fiona Plunkett can be found at: http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000610701/HierarchyTree#page/6/mode/1up
43
Carr imagines a different narrative than the one that has been imagined by the
reading of Thomas MacDonagh’s final letter and the rumors about his noble death. This
was her intention. In an interview, she stated, “I imagine there was a lot of doubt and
disappointment about the Rising despite the official versions handed down” (qtd. in
Brady). In so doing, Carr interrogates the collective memory of MacDonagh and
questions the validity of the archive in constructing social memories and cultural
narratives. The MACDONAGH monologue places historical associations and
imaginative history of Thomas MacDonagh’s person on display side by side, opening a
window to invite the audience to question the “official” stories that have been told to the
Irish public. By focusing her attention on the representation of MacDonagh’s tenderness
and concern for his family, Carr also invites the audience to consider the neglected
domestic histories of the nation and the role of the domestic sphere in the revolution and
formation of national identity.
Historical objects play a role in other characters performances as well, albeit to a
lesser degree. The traces of 1916 in 2016 are performed through objects in the
monologues representing Séan Mac Diarmada, Padraig Pearse, and Elizabeth O’Farrell.
Each of the three objects are backed by archival materials and perform highly personal
information. The buttons on Mac Diarmada’s blazer stand in for his absent body in the
mind of his former fiancée and in the presence of the audience. A crucifix and the way it
is used by PEARSE works to trouble dominant narratives of Pearse as a fearless hero. A
photograph of Elizabeth O’Farrell is challenged by other aspects of her story, showcased
through Emma Donaghue’s exposition of O’Farrell’s role in the facilitation of the
44
surrender. Each object asks questions about memory and legacy by connecting artifacts
from 1916 to the present moment of performance in 2016.
Séan Mac Diarmada’s final hours, as narrated by his fiancée at the time of his
death, Josephine “Min” Ryan, employs a mundane physical object to perform the absence
of Mac Diarmada’s physical body. In an official account given to the Bureau of Military
History in 1950, Min Ryan (Mulcahy, by that time) details the possessions that were
passed on to her by Mac Diarmada: a rosary, a signet ring, and some buttons. Buttons are
an odd item to entrust to someone as valuables and this information found its way into the
monologue written about Mac Diarmada by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne. In the performance,
RYAN remembers Mac Diarmada’s request that the buttons be given to his old
girlfriends as mementos. At first, RYAN finds this silly, but after consideration she says
to the audience, “I suppose anything a person wears – it’s a link to their body, isn’t it?”
(Ní Dhuibhne). Significantly, the bodies of the executed rebels were not returned to their
families. The physical body of Mac Diarmada is absent from Signatories and from any
traditional site of remembrance, as he never received a proper burial. His body must,
therefore, be represented through surrogation, a process Joseph Roach describes as a
practice where “Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of
departure…survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates” (2). The buttons, then, act as
surrogate bodies, both connecting the audience to the person of Sean Mac Diarmada and
underlining the absence of his physical and even representational body. The buttons
perform as relics of the absent body, or, to cite Roach again, the buttons perform as
effigy. Roach uses effigy in the verb form where “…it means to evoke an absence, to
body something forth” (36). The button body forth the absent Mac Diarmada and perform
45
the remembrance of his life and death through an article of clothing that is just as
intimate, familiar, and quotidian to an audience 2016 as it might have been to Mac
Diarmada’s friends in the wake of his death.
On display in the museum at Kilmainham Gaol is a crucifix. The crucifix is black
adorned with a brass figure of Christ, a skull and cross-bones, and decorative accents. It
is a visually dramatic object due to its size and the contrast of its colors. It is a replica of
this crucifix which was lent to Pearse by a priest on the night of his death that PEARSE
picks up at the end of the monologue written by Thomas Kilroy. The object explicitly
performs the archive, giving it agency beyond the archive and entering it into the
repertoire of performed history and gesture. The crucifix, of course, performs the
associations of Pearse’s devout Catholicism and his legacy of embodying the cult of
blood sacrifice. However, the appearance of the crucifix performs more than just
religious associations. In this case, the interaction of the archive (the crucifix) and the
repertoire (the embodied performance of Pearse) creates a window through which the
audience is given the opportunity to question the cultural myth about Pearse’s legendary
courage. This moment of questioning occurs in the final interaction with the object. After
fastening his blindfold, PEARSE “gropes for the crucifix and holds it with both hands,
aloft” as he cries his final lines, “Run! Run!” before the ringing sound of a shot is heard.
(Kilroy 26). The tangible handling of the crucifix coupled with the choreography and
dialogue allows the audience to imagine what Pearse might have felt, might have thought,
might have prayed, on his final night in Kilmainham. Suddenly, when confronted with
this image21 created by the object and PEARSE’s body in motion, along with the fierce
21 Production still of this moment can be viewed in appendix ii, pp. 75
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cry of his final words, “Run! Run!” the audience must confront the possibility that Pearse
was not as brave and resolute as he has been described in the canon of Rising mythology.
The imaginative space for interrogating accepted narratives is opened by the image of a
terrified PEARSE hiding behind the cross, as if to use it as a shield. This image offers an
alternative to the deeply repertory image of Pearse delivering the Easter Proclamation at
the GPO.
A literal image from the archive opens a space for imagination of the history of
Elizabeth O’Farrell and her role in the surrender on April 29, 1916. At the moment of
surrender, O’Farrell, who had traversed the city of Dublin to broker the surrender and
alert the rebels to the end of the fight, stood beside Padraig Pearse as he handed over his
weapons to the British. There was a photo22 taken to commemorate the surrender in
which Pearse and two British officers are pictured. There is something odd about the
photograph which has captured the Irish imagination for a century: the hem of a woman’s
skirt and her boots can be seen standing on the far side of Pearse (furthest away from the
camera). There has been heavy speculation, some would say imagination, about the
circumstances of O’Farrell’s obscurity in the photograph. Multiple versions of the image
do exist and in some, O’Farrell’s boots and skirt have been painted or airbrushed out,
though her face cannot be seen in any version. The controversy over this altered image
has stirred controversy over the image’s implications, with some equating the removal of
O’Farrell from the photo with the removal of women from the history of the Rising
(Higgins 19). The O’FARRELL of Singatories, written by Emma Donaghue, performs
22 Photograph located in appendix iii. Digital copy of the original image can be found in RTE archives at https://www.rte.ie/news/galleries/2014/0328/605105-cumann-na-mban/
47
the obscurity when O’FARRELL claims responsibility for being unidentifiable in the
photograph itself23 as she says, “…I sway backwards so the picture won’t include me, or
only my boots. Why should I be remembered?” (Donaghue 12). Donaghue does not take
a clear stand on whether or not the later erasure of O’Farrell’s presence points to any
particular hegemonic historical bias, instead, in the context of Signatories, the photograph
performs the controversy itself, questioning why O’Farrell exists in the cultural memory
of the Rising.
In an article from the Irish Independent published two months before the
centenary, the writer suggests that O’Farrell is “remembered for being forgotten” (Cox).
This idea touches on the contradictory ways things and people can be remembered; for
presence or absence. Donaghue’s monologue both acknowledges this contradictory
amnesia and performs a character of O’Farrell that might counteract the
oversimplification of her legacy to a controversy over a photograph. The process of
remembrance or commemoration, as in the case of O’Farrell’s lasting status in Irish
cultural memory of the Rising, is dependent upon a process of performing memories until
they reach a distilled form. By way of this infamous photograph, O’Farrell has been
memorialized as a woman forgotten, instead of for the numerous accomplishments of her
life in Irish society. Signatories attempts to re-memorialize Elizabeth O’Farrell by
drawing attention to the “processual and dynamic” modes of memory enacted by the
performance of established cultural histories (Plate 3). The photograph must be
performed because it is the locus of collective memory concerning O’Farrell. However,
in shifting the emphasis away from O’Farrell’s absence to her physical presence in
23 Her presence as the woman alongside Pearse is corroborated by other means, including firsthand accounts by O’Farrell and several other eyewitnesses.
48
brokering the surrender, Signatories imagines a competing narrative of O’Farrell’s legacy
that challenges the dominant conception. Additionally, O’FARRELL is the only character
who moves through the playing space24, forcing audience members to move and turn in
order to see her throughout the monologue. This choreography not only bears traces of
her historic movements in the aftermath of the Rising, but also commands the attention of
history. Her movement and the forced gaze of the audience underscores her visibility
instead of her invisibility.
The things a person touches, the things a society collects, the things that end up in
museums – these objects store and transmit meaning. When objects appear in
performance, whether they manifest physically or are implied linguistically, they are
imbued with performative qualities. In the hands of an actor, an object becomes an
extension of the action, an extension of character. Ceannt’s key, MacDonagh’s rosary,
Pearse’s crucifix; the handling of these historical items in performance lends credence to
the imagined history appearing before the audience. These objects give tangible markers
to the imagination which allow the audience to track the formation of a character and
their history through something they can touch. The traces of the Easter Rising and its
participants linger on and in these objects, allowing the audience of 2016 a point of
orientation to the performances they witness. Séan Mac Diarmada’s buttons, Elizabeth
O’Farrell’s photograph, and MacDonagh’s cigarettes create images in the mind of the
audience that play with previously determined associations. The intimacy of personal
belongings in tandem with material and historical preservation, performs history in an
accessible way. Signatories makes use of the archive in performance, transferring
24 As seen in video recording provided by UCD.
49
knowledge of archival materials through performance, thereby transitioning these objects
and their use to the repertoire of commemorative performance, meaning, and gesture.
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Chapter Three: Moving through Space
Lingering Choreographies and Geographies of 1916 in 2016
This chapter connects the movements and spaces utilized in the performance of
the signatories of the Easter Proclamation and Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell, as represented
in the play, Signatories, to illustrate the political, memorial, and traumatic significance of
spaces and movements (or choreographies) that continue to haunt the Irish cultural
landscape. Archival images become very useful in this chapter in order to accurately
examine historical spaces, as they are preserved in the archive through photographs and
maps, and their relationship to the spaces that the characters of Signatories embody
through language or setting. Additionally, this chapter will address the site-specific
element of the production and how the phenomenology of space both elicits and
transforms collective memories of the historical figures it houses in performance.
The content of Signatories is not the only place where the past manifests in the
present. The context – the physical location of the performance is an “emotionally
charged building” with history, memory, and trauma dating back to the mid 18th century
(Hit and Miss View of History, Sunday Times). Kilmainham Gaol was opened in 1796
and the east wing was replaced with the design that stands today in 1861. In 1910 the
Gaol ceased to be used for convicts and became a military detention center for WWI.
Following the Rising, the Gaol became a political prison until it was closed in 1924.
Today it functions as a museum.
The east wing of Kilmainham Gaol, where Signatories premiered, is as haunting
as it is haunted. As the historical location of the seven signatories’ detention and
execution, its connections to memory are more explicit than narratives or objects because
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“the narratives of cultural memory often have specific spatial associations” and these
physical environments can be embodied and performed but also perform themselves
(Carlson 136). The spirits of the signatories haunt the jail more directly because they
were actually there and now, in performance, they become the revenant communicators
of the 1916 legacy as they are embodied, once again in the last place they lived. It was
Emma Donaghue’s monologue for Elizabeth O’Farrell that inspired the staging of the
whole piece. Movement and space were very important to Patrick Mason, the director of
the project, as ways to connect the audience with the stories of each individual story and
with the collective story as a whole. In his foreword to the print copy of Signatories he
writes:
…the production itself…could represent a series of encounters made within a
performance space, that enabled the audience to connect the separate characters,
just as Elizabeth had connected the disparate rebel outposts on that nightmare day.
…I saw that the performance could take the shape of a promenade production,
with the audience moving from meeting to meeting, gathering, dispersing, and re-
gathering as the events of the Rising and its aftermath unfolded in and through a
sequence of intense theatrical encounters. (Mason xv)
Mason references the “shape” of the performance, envisioning not only the movement of
the characters but of the audience as well, likening this choreography to the gathering and
scattering of Dubliners – rebel and civilian – during Easter week. In doing so, he casts the
audience as witnesses, not just of a drama, but of history itself as embodied by the
physical spaces of performance. This staging necessitates the ability of audience
members’ movement – a traditional theater would not be the most conducive in this
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aspect. True to the spirit of the Rising and its rebel leaders, Mason and his colleagues
imagined an epic backdrop for the drama. They sought a place that would, as Marvin
Carlson writes, “provide appropriate ghostings in the minds of the audience imbued with
cultural symbolism and meaning that would give greater impact to the performance”
(136). The east wing of Kilmainham Gaol provided them the space, imagery, and
imagination necessary to achieve the desired effect.
In the daylight, the east wing of Kilmainham is strangely beautiful. The distinctly
Victorian style architecture and the huge arched skylights make the space look almost
like a church, lending the space a sense of spirituality (kilmainhamgaolmuseum.ie/the-
building/). However, the production did not take advantage of the natural light streaming
in from above. The performances took place in the evening hours as the sun was fading.
Once the sun goes down, the spirits evoked by the light streaming in from heaven are
replaced by an “air of ancient despair and heartbreak…an unnerving sense that weaving
around [the audience] in the gloom are the ghosts of those who died [there], listening to
every word” (Falvey). The space itself becomes a character, embodying the collective
narrative of the imagined signatories and therefore becomes an imaginative space as both
a container and dispenser of meaning.
The jail itself performs the role of spiritual medium, providing the mystical
conditions necessary for the apparition of 1916’s ghosts. Kilmainham’s physical presence
on the Dublin landscape is directly connected to the space it occupies in the cultural
landscape. Because the Rising took place in a concentrated cityscape, the physical
locations of events during its course have been mapped on both the physical and cultural
landscape. In the case of Signatories this occurs when the physical environment of each
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narrative is embodied through story or enacted through movement. The embodied
landscape functions as cultural geography, performing memory and history “as an
emblematic, socially constructed site of representation” (Whelan 17). Yvonne Whelan
writes that cultural landscape, which is echoed in the construction of physical landscapes,
is crucial to the semiotics of political and social constructs of power and contributes to
the narratives which form cultural identity (17). The jail itself, existing in both in physical
and cultural geography, occupies a significant space in the imagination of Irish
revolutionary history. As a fixture on Dublin’s cityscape, Kilmainham Gaol conjures the
ghosts of many revolutionary movements whose perpetrators were held there and
conversely the power that oppressed those movements. Historian Pat Cooke writes:
The opening and closing of the Gaol more or less coincided with the making and
breaking of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland. During the intervening
years the Gaol functioned like a political seismograph, recording most of the
significant tremors in the often turbulent relations between the two countries.
…There can be few places, therefore, that more intensely crystallize the forces
that shaped modern Irish nationalism than Kilmainham Gaol.25
The significance of the gaol on the Irish cultural landscape did not diminish with its
closure in 1924. For the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966, President Eamonn de
Valera reopened the east wing of Kilmainham as a museum. The jail has undergone
refurbishment throughout the 20th century and the museum has expanded. As the site of
historical events, namely the imprisonment and execution of the signatories of the Easter
Proclamation in 1916, Kilmainham continuously performs the memory of the Rising and
25 Quoted on the Kilmainham Gaol Museum website.
54
holds the last traces of the signatories themselves. This ghostly venue stands as a
monument to Irish nationalism and revolution on the cultural landscape, giving it
powerful significance as a performance space.26
The Easter Rising took place in Dublin, in its buildings, on its streets. The
surrender of the rebels, from the delivery of the official notice to the march of insurgents
towards Richmond barracks, likewise moved through the city. Elizabeth O’Farrell, a
member of Cumann na mBan27, who served as a nurse and cook at the GPO during the
rising, was tasked with delivering the surrender of the rebels to the English forces. Once
the surrender was finalized, she was sent to deliver the news to each rebel location
throughout the city. The monologue Emma Donaghue composed for the nurse opens
Signatories with a “dream journey” through the rubble of the city as reenacted by
O’FARRELL (Mason xv). The grueling march that the character recounts moves through
the whole of the city, stopping at each major rebel outpost, in essence, mapping the
Rising for the audience and situating it in the landscape. She visits each of the major cites
of conflict: Sackville Street, St. Stephen’s Green, the College of Surgeons, Four Courts,
Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, and Boland’s Mill. Donaghue sets the stage, quite literally, in
O’FARREL’s route through Dublin.
{Lights up on Elizabeth O’Farrell, standing alone on a spiral staircase. She
speaks with a commanding voice, looking out into the space of the east wing of
26 Prisons more generally also have a strong history on the Irish stage. The semiotic power of the prison is harnessed in iconic Irish dramas such as The Quare Fellow by Brendan Behan (1954) and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness (1992). 27 Cumann na mBan: a paramilitary organization for women that became affiliated with the Irish Volunteers in 1916.
55
Kilmainham Gaol but envisioning the Dublin city streets turned to rubble. She crosses the
space of the room, making her way through the crowd of audience members to the
opposite side where she climbs the long angular staircase – all the while lost in a
memory.}
O’FARRELL first encounters the destruction of Sackville Street, Dublin’s main
thoroughfare to this day (now O’Connell Street) where the GPO once stood. She
embodies the struggle over cultural landscape in this encounter with “Sackville Street, or
what used to be Sackville Street” (Donaghue 9). Not only does O’FARRELL embody the
destruction of the physical environment, but also performs the politics of naming as
Sackville Street is now called O’Connell Street after an Irish politician (Daniel
O’Connell) who campaigned for the rights of Catholics to practice their faith unhindered
by penal laws and for their ability to sit in parliament. “What used to be Sackville Street,”
therefore, performs both the physical transformation of the city and the ideological
transformation of the cultural landscape. Continuing down Sackville, O’FARRELL
encounters “Nelson’s pompous pillar still standing, lording it over poor Dublin” (9). Here
Nelson’s Pillar (finished 1809), a monument to a British naval hero of the Napoleonic
wars, embodies the controversies of contested landscapes in the city, invoking the history
of this monument in 1916 and its future. It was bombed and destroyed by radical Irish
republicans in 1966.
In her book Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscapes, Iconography, and the
Politics of Identity, Yvonne Whelan explains the powerful relationship between
monuments and cultural memory:
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Within official public landscapes, state-sanctioned monuments, architectural and
urban design initiatives, along with naming strategies, act in different ways and to
varying extents as spatialisations of memory, making tangible specific narratives
of nationhood and…reduce fluid histories into sanitized, concretised myths that
anchor the projection of national identity onto physical territory. (Whelan 15)
Nelson’s Pillar stood as an embodiment of British power, particularly military power.
The fact that the monument escaped the Rising unscathed haunted the generations of
republican revolutionaries that came after 1916. Even after the Anglo-Irish Treaty,
Nelson remained as a ghost of British power and influence over the very construction of
Ireland and therefore Irish identity. Under Whelan’s analysis, the destruction of the pillar
was inevitable as it was a quotidian reminder of the traumatic intercultural relationship
between Dublin and England. O’FARRELL also constructs a memory of Nelson’s Pillar,
performing the image of this monument into existence, for younger generations who may
have never heard of it, much less seen it.
The spatialisation of the Rising in the cultural imagination has many dramatic
images to draw from. St. Stephen’s green is a park at Dublin’s city center that was briefly
occupied by the rebels in the early days of Easter week. As O’FARRELL continues her
trek through the memory of 1916 Dublin, she animates the dramatic action of rebels
digging trenches in the park lawns. She describes the grass as being “scarred” a
powerfully imaginative word that performs not only this historical fact, but also the
lingering effect of the image in the collective cultural history. After being forced from the
GPO, the temporary headquarters of the rebel leaders was moved to a cannery on Moore
street that O’FARRELL says “reeks of blood and guts” (Donaghue 5). The character
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performs these historical spaces with vivid, evocative language in order to engage the
imagination of an audience who likely already knows the history of the event.
O’FARRELL speaks in shifting tense throughout, suggesting that she both is and
was embodying the spaces she describes. It is fitting that the monologue focuses on her
journey through the physical space of Dublin – she is a survivor who lived on, who could
carry the memory of spaces even after they had been refaced. The survivor’s guilt she
feels is also spatially located. “The weight of memory,” O’FARRELL says, is “like a
gravestone over [her] head” (Donaghue 12). The gravestone represents her own death and
amplifies the guilt her walking ghost feels, knowing that the rebels executed at
Kilmainham never received a proper burial. Her recurring embodied dream of the march
around town serves as an act of penitential remembrance as she methodically retraces the
steps through each station.
In an interview, Donaghue describes the march as a “…grueling task that was
very much in the whole tradition of penitential walks, like going around Lough Derg in
your bare feet. It was [a] sort of sorrowful and ritualistic task…” (Emily Donaghue qtd.
in Conroy). Linking the surrender to a highly ritualized and penitential choreography
speaks to the level at which O’FARRELL embodies the Dublin cityscape. She performs
the idea of surrender as process and not product by mapping the physical path required to
end the war. In fact, it is the choreography that allows her to embody the memory of the
geography: “And all night, in my dreams, for years, I’ll still walk these penitential
stations, losing myself, explaining myself, crisscrossing Dublin from outpost to outpost”
(Donaghue 10). The pattern evoked in the penitential walk is what evokes the memories
she performs. She is the walking repertoire, performing memories that have been
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embodied in her traversing of the city. The cityscape itself enacts memories through its
physical structures, but the narrative that ties them together is performed by the
movement through them as embodied by O’FARRELL. She is a pilgrim, returning to the
sites that she and the martyrs of the Easter Rising walked – only they received their
salvation and subsequent canonization through death. O’FARRELL is compelled and
condemned to make her pilgrimage in order to bear witness to her own role in the events
of Easter Week, and to repent of her failure to join them in death.
Joseph O’Connor is unique in his approach to imagining the memory and history
of the signatories spatially as he constructs elements of Joseph Plunkett’s memory in the
space of the body.
{A pool of light surrounds Plunkett and his body casts a long shadow. He wastes no time
in beginning his address to the audience. He speaks to them pointedly, aggressively at
times. He seems so very alone – no furniture, no platform to stand upon – just one man in
a small pool of light surrounded by a menacing darkness.}
O’Connor uses Plunkett’s own body as an experiential space and vessel for memory
storage and transmission as well as representing the landscape of Ireland in the linguistic
female body. The representation of the Irish nation as embodied by the female form is
echoed consistently throughout Irish history and reverberates even today. O’Connor’s
PLUNKETT participates in this repertory performance of the nation as female when he
describes her as his “mistress…beautiful and elusive…she was demanding of everything,
my soul, my way of seeing…She’s called Ireland” (108). This image serves to center the
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rest of the monologue in a particular tone that is romantic, poetic, and a bit coy. In this
same breath, PLUNKETT communicates that Ireland has co-opted his senses, his sight in
particular, and therefore performs an inverse of gender dynamics in that “she,” the nation,
has possessed him, as opposed to the traditional conception of the land as female to be
conquered, owned, and defended. This performs the body as space that can be conquered
and the space of PLUNKETT’s own body becomes a space in the monologue where
various memories are stored.
PLUNKETT’s body is an interesting space to store memories because it is a space
occupied by illness. O’Connor takes the medical facts of Joseph Plunkett’s health and
uses them to perform the dynamics of traumatic memories as they manifest in the human
body. Early in his life, Plunkett contracted tuberculosis and he suffered from ill health the
rest of his life, even undergoing an operation just weeks before the Rising on the glands
in his neck which had been infected with tuberculosis. O’Connor uses the realities of
Plunkett’s health in 1916 as a framework to perform the physical trauma of war for the
modern audience in 2016. PLUNKETT references his poor health by saying, “The
eastern religions preach that grief is stored in the lungs, that loss is actually physical. Talk
a lot of rot, but it rather makes one think, no? Grief stored in the lungs. Perhaps”
(O’Connor 109). PLUNKETT’s weak lungs are represented as a storage chamber for
grief and he concedes that perhaps loss is experienced physically. O’Connor uses the
actual physical trauma in the body, to expose emotional trauma of life and war.
PLUNKETT succumbs to two fits of coughing as he addresses the audience and his
labored breathing is audible throughout the monologue28, a natural reaction to his
28 These sounds were observed on the video recording provided by UCD.
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physical illness, but also a compulsory action to attempt to exorcise his grief and loss
before his execution. Grief is not the only thing that PLUNKETT has stored in his sickly
lungs. The contradiction of Plunkett’s upbringing in a wealthy Irish family, education in
an English boarding school, and yet his ardent Irish nationalism and concern for the poor
of Ireland is explored when PLUNKETT speaks of a time in his life where he
encountered poverty first-hand. In performance, PLUNKETT tells the audience that his
event took place in the Rotunda Ring in November of 1913 (1:34:00). This information
links the performance to the archival documentation of the first meeting of the Irish
Volunteers29 which took place at the Rotunda complex on November 25, 1913. This
moment performs the archive and informs the reading of PLUNKETT’s experience of the
event. He encounters poverty at this meeting and describes it as a condition he actually
“inhaled” (O’Connor 110). PLUNKETT’s lungs function, again, as a space of experience
and memory; a place of recall. And yet, the memory of poverty and injustice is stored in a
space that is debilitated and unable to act at the level necessary to enact change. This
performance echoes the realities of the Rising as a whole. The insurrection took shape in
ideological and physical spaces with the best of intentions but without the strength and
ability to carry out those intentions.
O’Connor’s PLUNKETT character explicitly addresses the interpretation of the
Rising as a theatrical event and the awareness of those involved in its planning and
execution. The monologue addresses the way that Plunkett’s marriage to Grace Gifford in
Kilmainham Gaol the night before his execution functions as a repeatable performance,
29 An exhibition commemorating Irish Volunteers which includes the flier used to advertise the meeting can be found at http://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Military-panels_V8_IG.pdf
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one with familiar elements and yet made strange by the space in which it took place.
O’Connor describes the wedding this way: “And there we were: my Grace, the soldiers,
the priest. Bars on the prison chapel windows. The mise-en-scene. The performance”
(114). This description of the wedding, spoken as if being read from the stage directions
of a script, performs the image of a prison marriage as powerfully to an audience in 2016
as it would have in 1916. The monologue sets the stage, creating an imaginary memory
of the space and circumstances of tragic marriage in the minds of the audience. O’Connor
disclosed in an interview that he was fascinated by Plunkett and Grace’s decision to
marry because “Every wedding ceremony is a piece of theatre. I think Joseph and Grace
knew how powerful and lasting the imagery would be” (O’Connor qtd. in Conroy).
PLUNKETT’s description re-performs the actual event of Joseph Plunkett and Grace
Gifford’s marriage ceremony from 1916 in 2016, reiterating the tragic romantic nature of
the event and the lasting impression it has made on the Irish imagination. The
preoccupation with the performative elements of his own final moments also represents
Plunkett’s historical interest and involvement in the theater scene in Dublin at the time of
the Rising.
O’Connor also uses PLUNKETT’s location to expose the tensions of Irish
national identity formation in a highly Anglicanized culture. Plunkett’s history of struggle
with forming a strictly Irish identity is performed through his character’s memory of time
spent in England and his interactions with the English as a young man. PLUNKETT feels
both affection and contempt for the English. The geography of the United Kingdom and
the entangled relationships between Irishness and Englishness are represented by
PLUNKETT’s examination of the young man who guards him during his time at
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Kilmainham. He says the guard is a Londoner “From Stepney or Hackney. One of those
places. Mother was Irish. From Leitrim” (O’Connor 113). The geographic locations
represented in PLUNKETT’s monologue expose and perform the hybridity and cultural
confusion, and the highly circumstantial identification for many English/Irish men and
women with one or the other nationality. In 2016, these dual associations evoke the long
and complex history of emigration from Ireland to England.
By weaving in the modern archive, O’Connor constructs a space that exists
outside of linear time, making room for new imaginings of Joseph Plunkett and the nation
as a whole. PLUNKETT holds distinct socialist views that feel more like the politics of
James Connolly, despite the fact that the real Plunkett was mainly interested in cultural
nationalism. In a remark that is highly evocative of spatial politics, PLUNKETT
seemingly quotes the beliefs of Jim Larkin, a famous labor organizer and socialist in
Ireland at the time. O’Connor’s text reads, “…one couldn’t help but feel [Larkin] was a
sort of artist, had a way of seeing. That Ireland didn’t need to be a slum with a casino
attached” (110). In performance, the lines are delivered as one continuous thought,
directly linking this remark to Larkin in the ear of the audience (Signatories video
recording, 1:32:46). The phrase is ambiguous and in the context of the Rising would
perhaps indicate that Plunkett agreed with Larkin that Ireland should not remain poor
whilst they are stripped of resources and wealth by their English oppressors. However,
the phrase is not from the Larkin archive. It is only attributed to one man, and that is
O’Connor himself, who used it in several impassioned letters written to various news
publications between 2010 and 2017 in reference to the “300 people in Ireland who live
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like rock stars while 4 million [citizens] foot the bill” (O’Connor, Irish people feel
frightened).
In performance, this remark collapses the temporal space between PLUNKETT
and O’Connor, as the character performs archival text written in the modern era by
O’Connor himself. O’Connor believes that Ireland should take better care of its poor, its
homeless, and its children and PLUNKETT’s performance transubstantiates these beliefs
from archive to embodied expression. What is so complex about this comment in the
mouth of PLUNKETT is that it performs the archive, just not the archive of 1916.
O’Connor has employed performance as a space of creation in part to reimagine Joseph
Plunkett, but on a greater scale to reimagine Ireland itself, its social and political future.
The slum and casino in this line of dialogue do not perform physical space. Instead they
tear time-space open in hopes that the rupture might birth the new more socially
conscious nation that O’Connor advocates for.
The space of time sometimes fosters a new examination of cultural memory and
the ways it is used in society. In other cases, time allows for reflection and stronger, more
concretized memorial narratives. A young Josephine “Min” Ryan speaks to the audience
from 1919, with three years of memorialization in her mind, to tell the story of Séan Mac
Diarmada’s final hours in Kilmainham. Eílís Ní Dhuibhne stages Min Ryan in Mac
Diarmada’s cell, in an unspecified time period which is both present and past. Because of
her references to her impending marriage, which took place in 1919, and her manner of
dress, the audience understands that she is set in the past.
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{A beautiful, young Min Ryan stands beside a vacant desk and chair. Her gown and fur
look odd against the sterile furniture. She takes stock of the space, looking around as if to
try and remember something that used to be there. She speaks the audience surrounding
her as if they were her friends, warm and funny.}
She recounts to the audience the last night she spent with Séan in the jail. “This is where
we sat,” she says, reminding the audience of where they are and the very real people who
inhabited the cells around them (Ni Dhuibhne 81). The space where the audience stands
to watch her suddenly comes alive with fresh presence and weight. As she continues to
tell the audience about Mac Diarmada’s charm and humor, she details two important
choreographies that manifest the Rising in the present. Through language, RYAN
performs Mac Diarmada’s experience of the surrender of the Rising.
He walked from the Rotunda to Richmond Barracks, without his walking stick.
Some officer took it from him. There’s always a nasty type who gets a rise out of
being cruel. Séan had to lean on the shoulders of two men, dragging his poor
weak leg, all the way out to Inchicore. You know he had polio? He didn’t really
have use of his left side, it must have been agony. That’s the part I find hardest to
take. Him struggling along for miles without the stick. (84)
From the Rotunda to Richmond Barracks is over five miles. For a man who was partly
lame, it would have been a long, arduous, and miserable trek. The journey detailed in
RYAN’s memory performs the sentiment that became widespread among the rebels’
countrymen in the weeks following the Rising; that the British had been harsh and cruel
in their punishment of the rebels. This march of defeat functions in the present as a
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choreography – a prescribed sequence of movements that also performs the humiliation
of the loss and the continued authority of Britain over Ireland after the insurrection.
RYAN’s mapping of Mac Diarmada’s movements after surrender links the Dublin
landscape of 1916 with that of 2016 and brings the emotional implications of witnessing
such choreography in explicit terms, not necessarily to effect in the audience the same
emotions, but to help them connect to the process of grief that followed the Rising.
After leaving Mac Diarmada at Kilmainham, RYAN continues to map her own
experience of the surrender:
We walked down towards Islandbridge. …And there was a finger of pink light in
the sky over Kingsbridge…the sun came up in the east where the Liffey meets the
sea and the black water began to come to life. …Everything was quiet. Dublin
was dreaming for a moment, that strange time just before you wake up.
Kingsbridge was like Westminster Bridge, in the poem. All quiet and glittering in
the morning air. And the next thing, we heard the shots. (Ní Dhuibhne 88-89)
The politics of naming surface in her performance of the Dublin landscape. Kingsbridge
was renamed Heuston Bridge in 1941 for Séan Heuston, a leader during the Rising who
was executed on May 8, 1916 (Whelan 221). What is more palpable in the performance
of RYAN’s path after leaving Kilmainham is the grief and feeling of incompleteness, of
interruption. The Liffey river that flows through the heart of Dublin takes center stage in
her reflection, just as it does in the landscape. In the peaceful moment, located in the
cityscape of Dublin, the shots ring out and the monologue ends. The journey feels
incomplete. The lack of resolution in RYAN’s choreography of traversing the city after
visiting Mac Diarmada for the last time, performs the trauma of the sudden onset of war
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and subsequent executions. The incredible detail included in RYAN’s account of her
movements on May 12, 1916 suggests that the story has been told many times before. In
fact, she admits that she has told the story of Mac Diarmada’s last night “Over and over
again” (83). The audience is blindsided, awoken from the same slumber that rests on
Dublin in her recollection. The dream is significant as a space as well. RYAN admits that
her memory exists partly in a dream, or what feels like a dream. The performance draws
the audience in to her dreamscape where the city is quiet and serene only to awaken
suddenly to a nightmare.
Signatories explores the spaces and choreographies of Easter Week 1916 in order
to perform the significance of historical sites in the cultural landscape. The renaming of
city streets throughout the 20th century, the unveiling of monuments, and the headstones
Glasnevin Cemetery all function as markers of memory. Cities and monuments exist in
the material world and yet are deeply connected to the imagination of a culture and its
values. A statue of James Connolly30 stands as one of many effigies of the absent rebel
bodies. The representation of Elizabeth O’Farrell’s arduous trudge through Dublin to
deliver the notice of surrender in 1916 and Min Ryan’s walk through the silent streets on
May 12 perform memory as influenced by time, grief, and the guilt that comes from
survival. The retelling and retracing of these choreographies and remembrance of the
places where they took place function as confession and penance, an attempt to forget
that they survived in the same streets where others died. As it moves through these
cityscapes which exist somewhere between reality and dream, the body performs the
spatializations of memory. So too, the body itself is a space, a site of memory and literal
30 Located at Beresford Place, near Liberty Hall
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embodied trauma and history. Joseph Plunkett’s illness becomes a way to transfer
understanding of emotional trauma to the tangible plane. In all these varied spaces and
choreographies, 1916 is transmitted to 2016. The names may be changed, the people may
be gone but through the vehicle of performance, the imagination of the audience takes the
remaining traces and builds and choreographs memories of 1916, influenced by the both
the archive, the repertoire, and the somewhere in between.
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Conclusion: Locating Signatories in the Larger Centenary Dreamscape
A hundred years have passed and the Easter Rising remains a significant force in
Ireland’s cultural memory and identity. Performance transmits information from a script
and other prescribed directions of place, persons, and props into ephemera which resides
in the memory of an audience. The Rising was one such performance and now, 100 years
on, each performative commemoration of the Rising reveals different facets of the history
and memory of the event. Some ardently revere the Rising; some revile it as a reckless
conflict planned by a few misguided individuals. Either way, it clearly defines an
Irishman or Irishwoman by dis/association. Signatories provides a fluid interchange
between archive and repertoire that allows a modern audience to simultaneously connect
with the history of the Rising and to color that history with present tense associations.
Performance has the power to transform archival knowledge into embodied knowledge
that is then transferred interpersonally and generationally through the cultural repertoire
of gesture, language, and image, as I have demonstrated. The Rising and its leaders
occupy substantial space in the Irish cultural memory and imagination and thus are
frequently expressed through the art of the last hundred years. The trauma of war with
Britain and the aftershocks of civil war in Ireland along with the sectarian violence of the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, continue to play out on the stage in unspoken hopes that
performance might exorcise the painful ghosts of the past by allowing just enough
imaginative space to enact a future freed from that trauma.
Cathy Caruth writes about the Freudian philosophy of trauma, that the shock of
waking from a traumatic dream is not in being confronted with the traumatic pain or
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death; the shock comes from the realization that one has survived.31 The embodied
traumatic dream of Ireland’s history is performed through Signatories’ characters like
Elizabeth O’Farrell who walks the path of surrender through Dublin’s streets again and
again, each time aware of the bullets that took her countrymen but spared her life, or Min
Ryan’s compulsion to tell the story of Sean Mac Diarmada’s final hours. The amount of
theatrical, literary, and academic representations of the Rising that continue to emerge
today testify to the recurring collision of the traumas of Irish history with the continued
survival of Ireland. As each generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen grapples with the
traces of colonial and post-colonial history in a rapidly globalizing world, the ghosts of
the past resurface and reemerge in the imagination and on the stage.
The role of theatre in particular in the development of a national identity and
cultural history in Ireland cannot be underestimated and is truly a phenomenon in the
historiography of post-colonial cultural memory. However, that is not to say that
theatrical representation of historical events is not uncommon in other places in the
world32. Embodied cultural memory and archive often work in tandem and when this
relationship is explored in performance, the in-between of archive/repertoire gives birth
to the imaginative, dream space conducive for interrogating and memorializing collective
histories. The theatrical stage, while rich and prolific in Ireland, is not, however, the only
site of commemoration. To conclude, I would like to take a broader view of the discourse
and reception surrounding the larger context of centenary commemorations.
31 See Cathy Caruth’s analysis of Freud’s theories about repetitive traumatic dreams in Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals. 32 Of course, these theatrical representations take place all over the world, but there are particular case studies in India and Rwanda that resonate with the ideas put forth in this study. See appendix iii, pp. 77 for a brief overview.
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The commemorative events of the Easter Rising centenary were part of a larger
state commemoration project called the Decade of Centenaries which encompasses major
anniversaries of significant events in Ireland’s history from 1912-1923.33 In a statement
from the Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations, a group of historians working
in tandem with the government, the vision for the commemorations is as follows:
The commemoration will be measured and reflective, and will be informed by a
full acknowledgement of the complexity of historical events and their legacy, of
the multiple readings of history, and of the multiple identities and traditions which
are part of the Irish historical experience.34
The statement advocates for commemorations that are respectful of a multitude of
historical interpretations. Further, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan35
said this of the Decade of Centenaries and the centenary of the Rising in particular:
Reconciliation is at the heart of how we approach this Decade of Centenaries. A
century on, we are committed to remembering the events of 1916 in their totality
and according the different narratives and experiences of their participants the
respect they deserve. …An important part of the value of this centenary year is
the opportunity afforded to challenge and broaden our understanding of what
diverse influences contributed to making the Ireland of today. In doing so we also
33 From the third introduction of a Home Rule bill (1912) to the end of the Irish Civil war (1923). The Decade of Centenaries website has a wealth of information about the various anniversaries and their commemorations. http://www.decadeofcentenaries.com 34 The full statement can be viewed at http://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/statement/ 35 Served from 2014-2017
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try to imagine a future in which peace, reconciliation and respect for all traditions
on this island are irreversibly secured. (qtd. in The Irish Times)
In this same article, Flanagan urges the Irish public to acknowledge the loss of British life
during the Rising, a sentiment that stirred many different responses. The focus on
inclusion was noted in many news publications about various commemorative events,
some noting the inclusive tone of commemorations with admiration, some with
skepticism, and some with anger. The commemoration of the Easter Rising has, at
various times in Ireland’s history, been a very contentious issue. In 1991, the 75th
anniversary of the Rising, there was scarcely any commemoration of the event, largely
due to concerns over the continuing unionist/nationalist violence (the Troubles) occurring
in Northern Ireland. Both NI and Dublin shied away from commemorating the Rising out
of concern of deepening ideological divides and inciting further violence. Douglas Dalby
wrote in the New York Times that the tentative posture of the government and the spirit
of inclusiveness surrounding the 2016 commemorations germinates from the feeling that,
“unlike other nations that celebrate difficult birth pangs, Ireland retains a sense of
unfinished business.” The phrase “unfinished business” recognizes the ghosts of the
Rising that continue to manifest in commemoration and performance, like the Freudian
trauma that repeats again and again in hopes of exorcising the painful experience.
Many articles, whether in negative or positive tone, cite the multiplication of
narratives evoked by the 2016 commemorations. In the digital age, information (true and
false) is readily available to any person wishing to learn about the Rising and diverse
perspectives abound. As Ireland continues to wrestle with its national heritage, one major
development in the public consumption of history is getting credit for expanding the
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discourse surrounding the Rising. The public was given access to an enormous archive of
digitized documents from the Bureau of Military History and Military Service Pensions
Collection. These archival documents allow “families and communities to trace their own
history with a new level of detail and, therefore, ownership,” inviting the public to both
invest in and challenge accepted narratives (Murphy). This access is reflected in
Signatories, and other performances36 that negotiate the in-between of archive and
repertoire, with significant archival content included in the monologues coming from
these newly digitized files. Documents that had so long been out of reach of the general
public, opened up a world of opportunity to investigate family history alongside national
history, drawing the two together. When a story has been told countless times, often the
teller may not even quite remember all the details. The digitized military files provide
firsthand accounts that fill in the details that may have been lost or distorted over time.
The archival access, through personal research or through performances that embody this
historical information, facilitates commemoration that can reimagine of foundational
narratives of nationhood.
But what should the outcome of this reimagined narrative of Irishness actually
say? There is, of course, disagreement on this. Some feel that the “inclusiveness” of the
Rising commemorations serves to dilute not only the sacrifice of those who died in the
fight for Irish freedom, but the identity of the nation as a whole. For example, outspoken
Irish artist and republican, Robert Ballagh, was offended by the inclusion of British
military casualties of the Rising alongside Irish rebels on a monument in Glasnevin
36 All staged during Easter week in Dublin: Signatories, The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey, McKenna’s Fort (a play about Roger Casement) by Arnold Thomas Fanning, and A Great Arrangement (based on the letters between Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan) by Patrick Talbot. Listings from an article by Una Mullally.
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Cemetery which was unveiled as part of the 2016 state commemorations. He links this
and other inclusive practices of the commemorations to an abandonment of history and
“A society that abandons its history, culture, and traditions is a society that has an
identity crisis” (qtd. in Cullen). Others, however, felt that the state did not push
reconciliation and unification hard enough in the commemorative agenda. Irish Times
writer, Dennis Kennedy wrote a scathing indictment of the Rising commemorations,
arguing that as long as the Rising remains in such a central position in the Irish ethos, the
state will foster a “narrative that has no room for anyone unwilling or unable to honour
the Rising as the defining act of Irishness. Far from being inclusive, it is fatally divisive.”
With opposing views on the proper functions and results of Easter Rising
commemorations, what is the role of art and performance? The power of embodied
history and memory in performance is the ability to straddle the divide between archive
and repertoire, fact and fiction; to make room for multiple historic re-imaginings. In that
dreamlike in-between of reality and imagination, Signatories (and other performance
projects like it) invite audiences to question hegemonic cultural narratives and reimagine
historical contexts in dialogue with the present political moment. Connecting the past to
the present in ways that foster fresh analysis and reinterpretation is the key role of art in
political commemoration. A review of Signatories concluded that it was “not history but
theatre that proposes an imagined truth about its real characters, walking a tightrope
between fact and art” (Falvey). That tightrope is precarious, but when navigated well, it is
inspiring to watch. It is a balancing act, requiring enough archival foundation to ground
the performance in reality, and enough imagination to inspire new ways of thinking.
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Northern Irish artist Rita Duffy constructed an installation for the Rising
commemoration entitled, “The Souvenir Shop.37” The piece is staged as a gift shop where
one can purchase all manner of souvenir gifts as imagined by Duffy; from Black and Tan
Shoe Polish to Free State Jam. The store itself echoes the newspaper and tobacco shop
owned by Tom Clarke and the products within perform highly evocative moments in
Irish history. Like Signatories, Duffy’s installation performs history and memory,
walking the tightrope between fact and art. Works like Signatories or “The Souvenir
Shop,” dare to imagine historical and memorial perspectives outside the dominant
cultural narratives while still remaining grounded in the archive. They make room for
pride and regret, joy and pain, reality and fantasy. They make room for mixed feelings,
and the commemorative art that dwells in the in-betweens “boldly declare[s] that mixed
feelings are the heritage of the Rising” and “offer[s] these mixed feelings as public
property” (O’Toole). Re-imagined memories of the Rising expressed in the art of
centenary commemorations offer an alternative to the polarity of feelings surrounding the
event and its legacy. On the tightrope between archive and repertoire that is accessed in
performative representations of the Rising, Ireland inherits a legacy of the Rising that
both acknowledges the ghosts of the past and seeks to move into a new future; a both/and
heritage where there once was just an either/or polarity.
Signatories takes historical figures that have “grown larger than life,” “fights to
put “flesh on relic bones,” and offers mixed media of flesh and imagination to the public
(Kavanagh). Signatories does the hard work of building characters that connect the
37 To view images from this installation, visit http://www.artscouncil.ie/Art-2016/the-souvenir-shop/
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contemporary audience to a performative imaginary past, in hopes of enacting a new
future, outside the cycle of trauma. Will the signatories’ personas ever cease to be central
in state and artistic commemorations? That seems doubtful. Irish national identity, for
better or worse, is deeply tied to the Rising and the men and women behind its ideals and
enactment. As history continues to be commemorated, it must continue to be performed.
The interpretation of the archive may shift its meaning and the forms of embodiment may
change but one truth about the rebels continues to echo through time, “They shall be
speaking forever. The people will hear them forever.38”
38 From W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
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Afterword: Commemorative Dreamscapes of the Non-Western World
Two possible case studies for further investigation of the fluid relationships
between archive and repertoire in performance are briefly detailed below. The purpose of
these examples is to bring in a non-western perspective to the analysis of the principles
which have guided the formation of this thesis study. Dramatic commemorations of
India’s Independence Day and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda provide fruitful ground for
examining the dialectic of material/embodied memory.
To commemorate the 69th anniversary of Indian Independence on August 25,
2016, several plays that weaved together historical archive and cultural repertoire were
staged in Delhi examining various aspects of the revolution, partition, patriotism, and
terrorism. These productions, like Signatories, are the contributions of artists to the
cultural conversations surrounding independence. Two productions in particular that took
place in Delhi are examples of the dialectic of archive and repertoire and the resulting
performative imaginary of collective memory. Just as in Signatories, these plays manifest
in the inbetweenness of archive and repertoire where cultural dreamscape gives way to
collective imagination of the past and in turn, the present and future.
Wings Cultural Society presented a play titled Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan39 which
performs the politics of partition and nationhood through the story of poet Faiz Ahmed
Faiz, using letters between Faiz and his wife, as well as Faiz’s poetry, as a framework for
the narrative (Bali). Identity and nationalism can be imagined through the letters and
poetry of Faiz as he transitioned to Pakistani citizenship after the partition in 1947. These
archival documents act as artistic and historical anchors which connect the personal
39 Play is written in Urdu.
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history of Faiz and his artistic works to their legacy in the present. The play actively
performs the archive into the repertoire using the letters of this couple during the time of
Faiz’s imprisonment in Pakistan from 1951-1955 for alleged communist conspiracy
against the Liaquat adminstration. Through performance, the lives, politics, and
accomplishments of Faiz and his wife Alys are remembered. The play is written in the
language of the letters, Urdu, which inherently performs the political nature of language
in post-colonial nations. The connection of Faiz’s personal letters and poetry to the
commemoration of independence lies in the historiography of literature during this
critical time in India and Pakistan’s history. Parama Roy writes that “while historians
may lament the silence on partition in Indian historiography, the literary and filmic record
provides a rich, complex, and often contestatory perspective on national emergence and
national belonging” (Roy 366). Faiz poems and letters provide a literary archive that,
through performance, becomes a way to imagine Indian/Pakistani history of the
immediate post-colonial period.
Aazadi - The Birth of a Nation also played in Delhi during the 2016
commemoration of independence, performing archive alongside established repertoire.
Produced by the Natya Ballet Centre and Sangeet Natak Akademi, the production weaves
together the performance of archival texts through voice-overs of speeches given by
freedom fighters and choreography of traditional Indian dance forms. The play traces the
struggle for freedom from 1857 to 1947 through the intertextual play of written, spoken,
and embodied cultural text. The spoken text from archival documents memorializes the
ideology behind independence movements in India, performing the past in the present.
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The incorporation of choreography integrates the embodied knowledge of cultural
narratives stored in dance with the historical source material of written text.
Book of Life, a text out of Rwanda, takes a different approach to the
commemoration of history. Conceived by Rwandan theatre practitioner, Odile Gakire
Katese, Book of Life is a compilation of letters written to the dead of the Rwandan
genocide40 by survivors - some written by widows, some by children, and some from
perpetrators of the violence. Performers read the letters aloud and the piece also
incorporates music and choreography. Katese began the Book of Life project in 2009 for
the 15th anniversary of the genocide and excerpts were performed as part of the official
UN commemoration of the genocide in 2012. The interaction between performance,
archive, and repertoire is complex and nuanced in what intends to be an act of healing
rather than an act of entertainment or even commemoration in the traditional sense.
Working somewhat in reverse of productions like Signatories or Chand Roz Aur
Meri Jaan, that take historical artifacts and documents and perform them into imaginative
embodied memories, Book of Life takes the power of personal embodied histories and
transmits them to the archive. The testimony of embodied history put to paper performs a
different sort of transference. Instead of imagining collective memories as inspired by
archival traces, Book of Life performs the personal memory of survivors and victims into
historical archive in order to solidify memory, to give voice to the trauma individual
trauma that has been otherwise subsumed by the enormous scale of the genocide. And
yet, even as repertoire transfers embodied knowledge to the archive, the inbetweenness of
dream still manifests in the performance of the letters. Performance of the letters to the
40 The Rwandan genocide took place for roughly 100 days in 1994.
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dead from the living conjure ghosts, not just of the dead themselves, but of the dreams of
what could have been if not for the violence.
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Works Cited
Bali, Etti. “This Independence Day, relive the freedom struggle through theatre.”
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independence-day-relive-the-freedom-struggle-though-theatre/story-
nxEiuNEitHFaIsah7oghyO.html
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Brady, Lisa. "THE STORIES OF OUR SIGNATORIES." Daily Mail, Apr 22, 2016, pp.
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Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI,
U of Michigan P, 2001.
Carr, Marina. Thomas MacDonagh. Signatories. University College Dublin Press, 2016,
pp. 91-101.
Caruth, Cathy. “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals.” Assemblage, no. 20, 1993, pp.
24–25.
“Chand Roz Aur Meri Jaan.”wings.net.in/play/Chand%20Roz%20Aur%20Meri%20Jaan/
Collins, Lucy. “Imagining 1916: Writing and Memory.” Signatories. University College
Dublin Press, 2016, pp. xxi-xxvii.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
---Connerton, Paul. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Conroy, Catherine. "'It's Not a Historical Piece. this is Theatre'." The Irish Times, Apr 21,
2016, pp. 13.
81
Cooke, Pat. A History of Kilmainham Gaol (Government of Ireland, 1995) Cox, Catherine. “Elizabeth O’Farrell: The woman airbrushed from history.” Irish
Independent, 2 February 2016.https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/rank-
and-file/elizabeth-ofarrell-the-woman-airbrushed-from-history-34413628.html
Cullen, Kevin. “In its past, Ireland finds its future.” The Boston Globe, 24 April 2016.
Dalby, Douglas. “Ireland Seeks Peaceful Path to Marking 1916 Easter Rising.” The New
York Times, 23 April 2016
Decade of Centenaries. “Initial Statement by Advisory Group on Centenary
Commemorations.” http://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/initial-statement-by-
advisory-group-on-centenary-commemorations/
Donaghue, Emma. Elizabeth O’Farrell. Signatories. Univeristy College Dublin Press,
2016, pp.1-12
Enn Rwanda. “Gakire on impact of Ingoma Nshya and Book of Life.”
https://expats.news/rw/gakire-on-impact-of-ingoma-nshya-and-book-of-life/
Falvey, Deirdre. “Signatories Review: an imagined truth about key figures in the Rising.”
Irish Times, 24 April 2016.
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truth-about-key-figures-in-the-rising-1.2623129
Fehily, Rachel. Thomas Clarke. Signatories. University College Dublin Press, 2016, pp.
59-72.
Flanagan, Charlie. “Charlie Flanagan: We must acknowledge British soldiers killed in the
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82
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/charlie-flanagan-we-must-acknowledge-
british-soldiers-killed-in-the-rising-1.2660665
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Drama. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1994.
Hamilton, Hugo. James Connolly. Signatories. University College Dublin Press, 2016,
pp. 29-40.
Higgins, Roisín. Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of
the Easter Rising. Cork University Press, Cork, 2012.
"Hit and Miss View of History." Sunday Times, May 01, 2016, pp. 8, Global
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Kearney, Richard. "A YEAR OF DOUBLE REMEMBRANCE." The Irish Times, Jul 16,
2016, pp. 4.
Kennedy, Dennis. “Commemoration of 1916 was far from inclusive: This year’s
narrative excluded anyone unwilling or unable to honour the Rising as the
defining act of Irishness.” The Irish Times, 12 November 2016.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.
Convergences Cambridge, Mass.
Kilroy, Thomas. Padraig Pearse. Signatories. University College Dublin Press, 2016, pp.
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Linehan, Hugh. "Staging the Signatories in the Prison Where they Died." The Irish
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83
MacDonagh, Thomas. “Copy of letter from Thomas MacDonagh to Muriel MacDonagh
on the night before his execution in Kilmainham Jail, started by Muriel
MacDonagh and completed by Fiona Plunkett, 2 May 1916.” National Library of
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Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís. Seán Mac Diarmada. Signatories. University College Dublin Press,
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“Irish people feel frightened and unled.” The Guardian, 18 November 2010.
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--Collected Works: Political Writings and Speeches. Dublin, 1924.
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Works Consulted
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(2008). Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection. 589.
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Appendix i: Easter Proclamation
This is a photograph of an existing copy of the proclamation and a photograph of Patrick Pearse, which was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2008. The full text of the proclamation
referenced in this paper can be seen here. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/fine-books-and-manuscripts-
including-americana-n08501/lot.179.html
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Appendix ii: Production Still
Peter Gaynor as Padraig Pearse in Signatories, holding the crucifix (replica of the one preserved at Kilmainhan Gaol Museum) in the final moments of his monologue. Photo from The Irish Mirror. https://www.irishmirror.ie/whats-on/arts-culture-
news/signatories-irelands-top-writers-bring-7844092
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Appendix iii: Photograph of the Surrender
Photograph of the Padraig Pearse (right) surrendering to British officers. Elizabeth
O’Farrell’s boots and skirt hem can be seen beside Pearse’s boots. This photograph has been the source of much controversy because edited versions surfaced in newspapers
after the surrender wherein O’Farrell’s boots have been edited out.
