Davy Adams didn't want to do it. In fact he is regretting ever agreeing to take the lead in a play that brings back memories of such a painful period in his life. But here he is, sitting in west Belfast's Aisling Ghear Theatre Company, rehearsing the bilingual production Dialann Ocrais - Diary of a Hunger Strike, surrounded by sets daubed with evocative brown paint and getting angry at imaginary prison officers. With a few days to go before the play begins a nationwide tour, the nerves are setting in. "I can't wait till it's over," he says. "I really can't."
Adams's character is based on Bobby Sands, who died 20 years ago today in a HB-lock in the now deserted Maze prison. After first refusing to eat breakfast on March 1st, 1981, Sands went 66 days without food in an attempt to gain political status for IRA prisoners. Nine others also died in the hunger strikes. All over west Belfast in recent days, huge green Hs have been erected in their memory and a series of hunger strike-related events are being held in Dublin and Belfast.
Adams, a cousin of the Sinn Fein president, spent 17 years in prison, part of that time on the "blanket" protests. He was in the Gaeltacht wing of the H-Blocks when news filtered through of Sands's death. He shared a wing with one of the other men who died. Adams was first approached about the play, written by Peter Sheridan, when he was released under the Belfast Agreement last July. He took some persuading and is still uneasy with his involvement.
"I had never acted in my life but apart from that, this play has been emotionally difficult . . . it has been very hard because for me this is not just a drama, in parts you are reliving old memories. The strip-search scenes are particularly painful . . . but also the scenes where my character dies, you are trying to imagine those last seconds or minutes as someone's life saps away. I was on the same wing as Kieran Doherty who died, a big gentle fellow, so that was really hard." It was Doherty who alerted Adams to Sands's death in the early hours of May 5th. After hearing on a smuggled radio that the newly elected MP for Fermanagh South-Tyrone had died, Doherty shouted the news across the wing. "I turned to my comrade and I told him Robert's just died . . . we were in the depths of despair and loneliness, it is hard to explain it, but it was just me and him in the cell, total silence, an eerie feeling," he says. "They were 10 beautiful people, they died for their beliefs; they died for their friends and died for the greater goal of Irish freedom and nobody can take that sacrifice away from them."
Even then, as a young "blanket man", Adams believed Bobby Sands was ahead of his time. "I used to read his poetry and think `we are going to lose someone here with vision.' Because he had vision. Tremendous vision." Around 100,000 people attended the funeral of Bobby Sands.
Adams, now 42, grew up on the Falls Road and had been in and out of prison since he was 15. He won't go into detail about the reasons he was incarcerated on three occasions but sums up his activities as that of "a republican engaged in republicanism". "I'm a product of my time . . . if I had been born somewhere else I would have been engaged in normal things . . . but it wasn't like that. I am part of what I see as the unfinished business of the Irish people and their search for freedom; there have been a lot of sad times, some interesting times. Would I do it again? Yes, but I hope I never have to, I hope nobody has to experience what I have experienced . . . it is not a natural way to live one's life," he says.
Dialann Ocrais - Diary of a Hunger Strike begins a national tour on Monday in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. For more information contact Aisling Ghear, tel 048 90 20 80 40.
