‘On the Wire’: Learning to soldier on in a new Ireland

For decades, the nationalist thrust of 20th century Irish politics left gaps in the fabric of the country’s history. The involvement of Irish soldiers in the first World War offers a glimpse of one such lacuna: about 150,000 Irish soldiers signed up to fight with the British Army in France but many of their stories have gone untold, family secrets locked away for decades.

However, the 21st century has offered opportunities for revision and reclamation, and it is into this historical vacuum that Limerick-based Wildebeest Theatre Company offers its new production On the Wire, as part of Limerick City of Culture's year-long celebrations.

On the Wire, which is inspired by stories of Limerick people involved in the first World War, will be performed at the evocative location of The Sailors' Home on O'Curry Street. The two-storey building has its own complicated political history. It was built in 1857 as a refuge for the 1,500 seamen who passed through the busy trading city at the time.

However, due to controversy about potential sectarian prejudice and proselytism, the building was never used for its original purpose and remained empty until the Limerick City Militia rented it at the end of the 1850s as an artillery depot. Its various incarnations in the decades that followed were closely linked to the British Army, who policed the city until Irish independence was granted in 1922. At the outbreak of the first World War, it was an RIC barracks, and it is this British military history that Wildebeest tap into for On the Wire.

Around 840 Limerick men joined the British Army to fight in the war says writer and actor Mike Finn, who helped devise the production and is one of the central performers. Although On the Wire offers a fictional perspective on events, the company was interested in taking a "social history" approach to storytelling, rather than an entirely fictional one. In the course of its research, Wildebeest discovered primary accounts and opinions offered in contemporary local newspapers, as well as broader accounts of the period.

“There was a great tradition of Limerick men fighting for the British Army going back as far as the Boer War,” Finn says. “There were four different barracks in the city, which meant a lot of soldiers. It was a big part of working-class life but people wouldn’t really know the [soldiers’] stories. They say history is written by the victors and the history we would have been handed down by the Free State would have been written with a republican agenda in mind.”

Marie Boylan, who had the original idea for On the Wire and who also performs in the piece, has a personal story that is pertinent to this obscured narrative; she discovered in the course of her research that her grand-uncle "fought for the British in France, but he didn't come back".

Finn says the company was surprised to discover, as it compiled documents and testimony under the guidance of historian Eamonn Gardiner, that there "was broad support in Limerick for soldiers who joined up. The more you read contemporary reports, the more you see the depth of the support. There are accounts of fundraisers going on in rugby clubs, women sending out socks."

On the other hand, he says, when republican rebels visited the city in 1916 to drum up support for the Easter Rising, “there was quite a lot of ambiguity about the cause”.

Of course, all this changed after the Rising, when the rebellion’s leaders were executed in Kilmainham Gaol. Attitudes towards Irish men in the British Army were to change radically in the intervening years.

‘Visceral approach’

On the Wire

focuses on the aftermath of the first World War and on the lives to which the soldiers returned when the fighting was over, a post-1916 Rising Ireland.

“What we found particularly interesting was that the soldiers left one country and came back to a different one. They thought they would come back heroes but instead they were ostracised,” says Finn.

“We were also amazed to discover that nine out of 10 of the soldiers from the trenches actually made it home. Many of them were badly injured and almost all would have been traumatised, though back then the whole notion of post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t on the radar. Soldiers came back to their daily lives brutalised by their experience, and there was no help or psychological support. They carried the nightmare with them, and a lot of that anger would have been visited on the wives and children. So the story of their coming back is partly a domestic one. We are just as interested in what their families experienced.”

Marie Boylan says the evocative space at The Sailors’ Home means Wildebeest is taking a “visceral approach” to presenting this story. “We wouldn’t have been able to do the show without the venue. It is an integral part of the story we want to tell.”

Although the space has been in use as an arts venue since the start of the year, “it hasn’t been renovated so it’s cold and dusty. There are holes in the walls, which are crumbling in places. We hope it speaks to the soldiers’ experience [on the front] as well as that of someone coming back from war.”

The production is designed as a promenade piece, so the audience will move around the space with the actors as the story flashes back from the post-war domestic environment to the trenches and the hospitals where the soldiers were nursed back to physical, if not psychological, health.

Finn hopes the “intense proximity of the audience to the actors” will allow spectators to experience a little of what the soldiers did. It is a challenge for the performer, he admits, “because there is no place to run and hide, but I think there is a payback for the audience. The space becomes an extra character in the play and though they might have to work a little harder, they are totally immersed in the action.”

The company also hopes the environment will attract people who might not usually come to the theatre. “They might come for the space, which is really special, but we hope they come away with something even more memorable,” Boylan says.

On the Wire is at The Sailors' Home, O'Curry Street, Limerick, from November 10th to 15th. onthewire2014.com