Art is the way to the heart when commemorating a centenary

We are now well into the decade of commemorations, an idea that so far seems to belong largely to historians and politicians. And, up to a point, rightly so. We need historians to keep looking at the events of 1912 to1923 that shaped modern Ireland, to keep applying evidence-based rigour to received narratives and mythologies. We also need politicians to interpret those revisions of the past for the present and the future. But the truth is that the work of historians and politicians will mean very little without the work of artists. What is remembered, what goes into most people's hearts and heads, will be images shaped by writers and performers. "It is not," says Hugh in Brian Friel's Translations, "the lived past, the 'facts' of history that shape us but images of the past embodied in language."

We know this very well in Ireland, where artists have been very successful at embodying in language images of the decade we are now commemorating, even when those images contradict or complicate the official narratives. The most potent presentation of the 1916 Rising is still Sean O'Casey's highly subversive The Plough and the Stars. The 1913 Lockout, insofar as it occupies a place in public consciousness, is filtered primarily through James Plunkett's magnificent Strumpet City. Irish participation in the first World War, long marginalised, was crucially restored to popular memory by artistic reimaginings such as Frank McGuinness's Behold the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way.

Conversely, the ultimate testament to the importance of artistic interventions in shaping collective memory may be the things that are still forgotten. The struggle for women's rights, and in particular for universal suffrage, is unquestionably one of the most momentous episodes of the entire decade. But, in spite of some valiant efforts, it has not been successfully embodied in artistic language. It doesn't have its Plough and the Stars or Strumpet City, and therefore it has a much weaker hold on public memory.

Living the Lockout

All of this is by way of suggesting that there needs to be a serious commitment to artistic engagement with the process of commemoration – a commitment that is not especially evident so far. A small but brilliant example of what can be done with very modest resources is Living the Lockout, which is occupying the extraordinarily resonant space of 14 Henrietta Street in Dublin until the end of August. Staged by Louise Lowe's splendid Anu Productions team, it is supported by the Irish Heritage Trust, Dublin City Council and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, itself an innovative collaboration.

Site-specific work has been the modus operandi of Lowe, designer Owen Boss and the core team of actors who have worked on the breathtaking Monto cycle that has unfolded around Foley Street and in the Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott Street. The house at 14 Henrietta Street is certainly a site for wide-open eyes: the stripped-down shell of a splendid Georgian townhouse, built about 1748. It still has small, and therefore haunting, relics of its old decency: neoclassical plaster friezes with garlands and lyres, fat putti on the cornices, torn fragments of lush 19th-century wallpaper. But it also has the rough partitions that divided it up into tenements of the kind that made Dublin internationally notorious for overcrowding and disease; in 1913 an astonishing 100 people were living in the house.

Lowe, Boss, sound designer Carl Kennedy and costume designer Niamh Lunny are smart enough to allow the house to exert its own grip. They use two high-ceilinged rooms and one claustrophobic corridor to stage three relatively short scenes that, with skilful economy, contain the history of the Lockout as experienced by the occupants of the house.

In the first, Lloyd Cooney and Eric O’Brien play two brothers who are members of Jim Larkin’s locked-out union. They are pumped up by the heady, revolutionary euphoria of the early days of the action, both repelled and excited by the violence of Bloody Sunday, when the police baton-charged peaceful citizens, and the riots that followed. For the second, we enter a darkened room in which a mother is putting two sick children to sleep in a big wrought-iron bed – an image clearly inspired by a now-famous photograph of children in a tenement interior. The mother is played, very touchingly, by Laura Murray, whose monologue is partly based on her own grandmother’s letters. It raises the darkest question of the Lockout: is it better to fight for justice while your children starve or to end the suffering by knuckling under? The third scene, in the corridor, plays out that conflict between the two brothers at the end of the Lockout, as one submits and the other insists on fighting on.

As well as being gripping and immediate, the drama is strikingly complex. It plunges us into human dilemmas – the attraction and repulsion of violence, the frightful cost of struggle, the tensions between individual and collective imperatives. It is deeply concerned with the dignity of the people it portrays, yet utterly devoid of heroic rhetoric or cheap sentiment. It shows, in 35 highly charged minutes, how memory does not have to be morbid and how thoughtful commemoration differs from mindless celebration.

Living the Lockout plays seven times a day at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1, until August 31st. dublintenementexperience.com

fotoole@irishtimes.com