An Irishman's Diary

OF ALL the Dublin venues temporarily lending themselves to theatre over the next month, none surely is as well-qualified as Green Street Courthouse.

In its former day-job, for more than two centuries, the building hosted some of Irish history’s greatest real-life dramas, with a cast including Robert Emmet, the Invincibles, and The Man from God Knows Where.

If the walls could talk, they might still be too traumatised to do so. In the mid 1970s, after all, one of them had a hole blown out of it during a escape attempt by republicans awaiting trial.

So not only is the old courthouse – now retired from legal work – an apt venue for things theatrical. But when a playwright collective called Percolate decided to produce a work of history for the Dublin Fringe festival, it had in the building’s back-story a very rich source of material.

Intensive negotiations with the Courts Service and much work later, the result is that for 10 days starting this Friday, Green Street will be home to a play of the same name, highlighting a selection of the most famous and infamous moments of the courthouse’s life, exactly where they happened.

The show is built around three major trials representing different eras, starting with Emmet’s trial: an automatic choice for the 1798-1803 period.

From the late 1800s, by contrast, the play focuses not on events on the Phoenix Park but on the less obvious Maamtrasna murders, in which the slaughter of a Connemara family was compounded by a tragic miscarriage of justice, lost in translation upon the Irish-speaking protagonists, in Dublin.

As for Green Street’s latter-day role, as a “special” court trying paramilitaries, drug-dealers, and others deemed too much of a challenge for juries, the choice was constrained by legal considerations.

After careful thought, the period is represented by the case of Noel and Marie Murray, the anarchists who earned a death sentence (subsequently commuted) for the murder of Garda Michael Reynolds in 1976.

NO EPISODEof the court's history is more celebrated that Emmet's speech from the dock, which as the play's promotional material says – in the language of our times – "went viral" soon after delivery. Yet the same speech illustrates some of the challenges of staging a work like this.

For all the fame of Emmet’s reputed words, there is no original script. So having gone viral, the speech soon mutated, as viruses do. At last count, there were at least 70 different text versions. And as recently as the 1980s, historian were still arguing over whether the single most famous part of the speech – Emmet’s concluding flourish, about the writing of his epitaph – was ever spoken.

In fact, one of the two versions considered most reliable by the experts doesn’t mention it. But a possible explanation is that the court reporter responsible, William Ridgeway, stopped taking detailed notes from the point where the judge, the notorious Lord Norbury, first started trying to interrupt the prisoner.

In any case, the creators of Green Street opted for the “Madden version” of the speech (so named for the historian who first published it, although confusingly, it was the work of a stenographer called Angell). This is in some ways less poetic than Ridgeway’s but does have the famous climax.

Audiences of and in Green Street can decide themselves what influence the building’s acoustics may have had on the confusion. For where courthouses fall down as theatrical venues, perhaps, is in the matter of acoustics. As many long-suffering journalists will testify, it can be extremely hard to hear exchanges between lawyers (who tend to have their backs to the gallery) and the judge.

But Robert Emmet, at least, made a big effort to project his voice – so much so that it was claimed he could be heard from outside the building’s main door. The actors in Green Street will no doubt do their best to emulate him if required.

The circumstances also promise to be a bit more intimate on this occasion. With audience capacity limited to 40, even a full house will outnumber the large cast by only about two to one.

Furthermore, such is the nature of the play that both cast and audience will for some of the time be subdivided. Thus the action unfolds not just in the main courtroom but in a series of ante-chambers, through which audience members will be guided, aptly (or not, given the later history of the court), in almost jury-sized groups of 10.

Green Street runs for 75 minutes twice daily from September 14th, at 7pm and 9pm. Tickets from €11 can be booked at 1850-374 643 or via fringefest.com