A daughter sexually assaulted by Black and Tans, a ‘parcel of bombs’ in a woman’s pocket

The atmosphere of bleak supremacy within the Tudor walls of Elizabeth Fort in Cork is dented by the tone of enthusiasm and creativity characteristic of Louise Lowe. In a break from rehearsals for her new work with Anu, the company she founded in 2009 with the visual artist Owen Boss, her laptop screen shimmers with text and images.

In a technological counterpoint to a narrative spoken with a combination of energy and precision, a page from the Irish Bureau of Military History slides up. Another touch on the keys brings up a handwritten, and unsuccessful, application from the Irish pensions files explaining the nationalist career of Birdie FitzGerald, whose military instructions in 1923 were to “go to a girl, inform her to have the barracks burned down and then retreat to the West”.

As we sit in a very temporary green room in the terraced domestic buildings of the fort, Birdie FitzGerald emerges as one of the women whose lives from 1916 to the Civil War, which ended in May 2023, the writer and director has explored. “My underlying principle in the work I do is to seek out who’s not in the picture, whose voice isn’t heard. Here we have a lot of quiet, unremembered women who were unrecognised even at the time.”

Theirs are the voices of The Wakefires. Theirs are the stories to be told through a fiction so reliably based on fact that, once again, Anu can illuminate an era casually well known but so complex and so hidden that its truths are stark with surprise. In the company’s first work for Cork’s Midsummer Festival, in partnership with the National Museum of Ireland, Lowe threads her investigation of an almost misogynistic culture through an episode of a family life.

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A daughter is sexually assaulted by a gang of Black and Tans. To comfort her, or to heal her, the embers of a bonfire of St John’s Eve at midsummer are crumbled, brought home and made into a potion. While the drama expands beyond this intimate consolation, intimations of custom, ritual and community remain at the core.

Since 2009, the list of Anu productions, coproductions, collaborations, nominations and awards seems to defy chronology; the creative team consists of Lowe and Boss as artistic directors, and Matt Smyth and Lynette Moran as producers; behind them stands a network of archives, folklore, scholarship and scholars usually linked by social issues and local history. Anu seems impelled to hurtle into the research needed to make its work as valuable and as contemporary as possible, deepening its commentary on our retrieved lives. But why The Wakefires?

This seems to have been one of the creative coincidences on which Lowe and the team at Anu habitually seize. For Lowe, the backward look began with a piece of human hair. “Sometimes in making the work you just hit on something, the link to the thing that isn’t talked about.” As a site-specific company, something similar happened with the discovery of Elizabeth Fort, “this amazing place”. She frequently has found references or clues at, for example, the National Museum of Ireland, where the curator Brenda Malone, whose areas of expertise include military history, had something to show her. “She comes at me with a kind of provocation, an object to pique my interest. That day she showed me a tea set, a book, which later became The Book of Names for Anu, and this piece of hair, cut from a woman’s head.”

As Malone had probably predicted, the hair prompted Lowe’s curiosity: “Whose head had it been cut from? In whose pocket had it been found? It’s only a flicker, but I’m very happy to embrace it.” Her hunt through the archives brought a reminder that the revolutionary wars were no less serious for the women involved than for the men. The woman body, she says, could be seen as a battlefield in itself, carrying what Birdie FitzGerald described as “a parcel of bombs”, or taking guns and ammunition where needed, bringing messages from street to street, village to village, hiding IRA men on the run.

The going was tough on the woman sex, and there is evidence of indignities or abuse inflicted on them—and it wasn’t all the Black and Tans

“The toil of it!” says Lowe, thinking of a recorded statement by Lil Conlon of Cork. “The going was tough on the woman sex, and there is evidence of indignities or abuse inflicted on them—and it wasn’t all the Black and Tans. It’s also sad to read of the attempts the women made to protect themselves, even later in giving statements. They had no words for what happened to them physically; the language could be very reticent.”

Although we sit within the walls of a fortress now popularised with cannon and spiked heads, the presences are those of this 100-year anniversary of the Civil War, as if claiming their place in a site already thronged. Originally a protective redoubt on the edges of the early city, the British garrison was reinforced with strong ramparts by Sir George Carew, who wrote home in 1602 that the work was great, “the Queen’s charge in erecting it nothing”.

Centuries later it housed an RIC barracks, taken over by the Black and Tans, evacuated by the Black and Tans and then used to billet prisoners by the Free State government, including “people of interest” among the anti-Treaty Cumann na mBan. We meet them here at the fort as they wait to be transferred to Kilmainham Gaol in an evacuation assisted, perhaps unsympathetically, by their former sisters-in-struggle, pro-treaty Cumann na Saoirse.

For Lowe, using the opened files from the pensions records, the Bureau of Military History and the academic studies of, for example, the historian Dr Mary McAuliffe of UCD, the way into this contested subject is through the personal. “It’s seeing, feeling that split in a very real way, seeing the chance of telling a different story.” It’s also a way of illustrating the ideological struggle which she believes was played out on women’s bodies throughout the years of revolution and for which individual characters weave the large and small-scale heroisms of a turbulent era into whole cloth.

“It was Lorraine Maye”—the festival’s director—”who suggested the symbolism of the summer solstice and the bonfires of St John’s Eve. These are originally the bonefires, the wakefires, thought to have almost spiritual powers to encourage crops, or a sod from the fire might be brought home for luck, or the ashes made into a balm or a purge.” But where is this legend made real? Where lies the myth of midsummer fire and ember and sod? Flesh is put on the fire through its Irish title, “tine chnamh” or the bonefire, which Dr Kelly FitzGerald, head of Irish folklore and ethnology at UCD and another source for Anu, explains as an ancient celebratory rite to mark a seasonal turning point in rural life.

The bitterness and pain of the Civil War are very difficult to address, but the job of art is to pose those difficult questions

The Wakefires is not made as a documentary. “We’re trying to pull all those forces apart now, to emancipate the material from the different pages, to give it life in the present. We’re not teaching history, but we’re asking questions of history, like in a fractured, fevered dream which nonetheless reflects the experiences of those years and especially of the women, ordinary women on both sides who had to be more than ordinary in extraordinary times.”

Still women, though: in a phrase reminiscent of Colm Tóibín’s use of Lady Gregory’s toothbrush, the anti-Treaty Cumann na mBan were warned by their leader Constance Markievicz that they could always identify a Free State woman by the superior cut of her coat. “Part of their role in supporting the Treaty was to police other women. It seems very strange to our world, to our ideas of sisterhood, but it shows how contested the Civil War was. Its bitterness and pain are very difficult to address, but the job of art is to pose those difficult questions.”

As these garrison rooms yield to the wallpaper and paint of a set design by Maree Kearns, there is again a questioning of a homely environment straining to survive amid the turbulence of war. “I believe art can act in a transcendental way when all the complexities are laid out. Outrages against women were commonplace during all three episodes of the Irish revolution but we don’t talk about that.”

Except that here, within these military walls that loom above a city street, that will be the talk.

The Wakefires is at Elizabeth Fort from June 15th to 25th (previews June 9th to 14th) as part of Cork Midsummer Festival