Riding the wave of the Rising

In his stage treatment of the 1916 Rising, the usually controversial writer Donal O'Kelly is for once seeking to reach the middle ground, he tells Sara Keating

As the historical hotbed of the 1916 Rising has been fuelling the public appetite for national navel- gazing over the last six months, perspectives have tended to fall within two poles of opinion: the white of the nationalist glorification of the rebels, and the black of revisionist condemnation.

However, as the adulation of the 1916 Rising dropped out of public consciousness for fear of justifying the violence of the provisional IRA, so too have the revisionists found that throwing the political baby out with the dirty bathwater of a violent history is not the answer to the questions that the rebels left behind them as they ascended to the pantheon of national history.

Of late it has seemed necessary to turn to literature for a wider view of history than the recent political climate has allowed, because between the harsh tones of historical hindsight lies a glorious spectrum of colourful contradiction, where real life witness accounts can challenge the judgments of both versions of history, and alternative understandings of the past become possible.

While politicians can rouse the masses to self-serving national pride, and columnists can challenge the ideological status quo, it is in the fictional life of the nation that the ideal of historical objectivity appears to find its fullest expression.

It is in literature that the losses of the victorious, the victories of the defeated, and the subtleties of human experience can find expression free from the dictates of the contemporary political agenda.

Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel A Long Long Way brought a sharp perspective to the 1916 Rising as it took place on the streets of Dublin, where Irishmen found themselves in combat with each other in accidental, unthinking betrayal.

Meanwhile, in Arthur Riordan and Des Bishop's recent play Shooting Gallery it was the ideology, rather than the morality, of the 1916 Rising that was at stake, with parallels being drawn between the ideals of the inspired leaders and the hallucinations of a pair of morphine addicts.

However, between the sincerity of the outsider perspective of A Long Long Way, and the irreverence of Shooting Gallery, the contemporary importance of the Rising as a ground-breaking moment in Ireland's political history was lost to the heart-breaking tragedy of fictional biography on the one hand, and hilarious farce on the other.

In Operation Easter, which opens at Kilmainham Gaol on April 24th, the original Easter Monday of 1916, writer Donal O'Kelly addresses the political and ideological inheritance that the 1916 Rising has bequeathed upon the nation.

O'Kelly is no stranger to asserting his political position in his work on the stage.

His interest in the plight of asylum seekers in Ireland, for example, has fostered a kind of "theatre of social-consciousness" that has been as varied as the site-specific drama Asylum, Asylum and the recent historical performance piece The Cambria. While O'Kelly is used to going against the grain in his work with Calypso Theatre Company, who are producing Operation Easter, he feels like his latest project is "riding the wave" of public debate rather than necessarily challenging the contemporary status quo.

Although he is used to dealing with unspoken issues of social injustice, the fierce "frenzy of media interest in 1916 has paved the way" for his theatrical take on the Easter Rising.

However, he hopes that his play will challenge the "nationalist glorification and revisionist hammer-bashing that still dominates public perceptions 90 years after the Rising took place" and reveal the "complexity, the full human picture" of the circumstances of the rebellion.

With an event as contentious as 1916, there appears to be little other option than to try to find the human truth amid the ideological ruins of history. For once, O'Kelly is not trying to push the boundaries.

He is trying to find the middle ground.

Speaking to O'Kelly in the spartan cafeteria of St Brendan's Hospital, Grangegorman carries with it an unusual set of environmental conditions that determine the tenor of our conversation. While the site is not quite as significant as the Kilmainham setting where Operation Easter will open on Monday, the oppressive sense of internment is very much alive in the grounds of the still-functioning hospital.

Actual history is an oppressive weight too; the ghosts of the leaders in their quicklime graves are no more than a mile away at Arbour Hill, while the phantom of a reproduction GPO from the film Michael Collins adds a natural sense of theatricality to the real historic facts. "This country was born out of violence," O'Kelly says.

"And the reason we're Irish is because some people went out with guns and did what they did. We're stuck in cloud-cuckoo-land pretending it didn't happen. Yes, it was an undemocratic, armed uprising. No, they had no mandate whatsoever. But we have to deal with that. Instead, it's like we're all going around with hatchets sticking out of our heads and we're just ignoring it."

O'Kelly diagnoses this denial as "histrialysis", a condition described in the play as "a psychic virus coursing through the air", and in our interview as a "collective historical paralysis, a psychological suppression that we've been inflicting upon ourselves which has prevented us from dealing with our past as a nation.

"But three generations have passed and it's time we dealt with it. There was the generation just after the Rising who idolised the leaders, but they didn't want to analyse what the Proclamation was about or the reason that the leaders did what they did. Then there was the generation of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, who suppressed interest in 1916 for fear that it gave support to the provisional IRA in the North, and they were right to do that; historical context comes into it, yes, but also moral rights and wrongs. Now, this is the first time we've had the chance to look at the full picture. It's taken 90 years."

O'Kelly sees the current public debate as a kind of therapy.

"It's like we've only just discovered a tumour and we're trying to excise it, and the only way that we can get over it as a nation is by talking it through."

While some may be dubious about the amount of media attention being given to last Sunday's military parade, O'Kelly insists "It's healthy, but it's unhealthy that it's taken this long for us to start looking at each other to ask, 'what was it all about?' This is the first time we've had the chance to look at the full picture and it's important that we look at it properly, and that this time we get it right."

Meanwhile, Operation Easter aims to perform the necessary surgery on our national consciousness by teasing out historical contradictions surrounding the surrender of the leaders and the legacy that the Proclamation has left on the present day.

The key character of Elizabeth O'Farrell (played by Mary Murray), for example, allows the forgotten importance of female activism in nationalist history to be brought out, while the four featured leaders, Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett (played by O'Kelly, Luke Griffin, Arthur Riordan and Ruaidhri Conroy, respectively) "cover the panoply, as much as that's possible, of the people who triggered and drove" the Rising.

However, a cast of ordinary characters, including wives, children, supporters and strangers, accompany the leaders on their journey from self-righteousness to surrender on behalf of the suffering citizens of Dublin.

For, while posterity remembers, with fondness or disapproval, why the leaders fought in the first place, O'Kelly insists that we also remember that they surrendered to protect the citizens from further slaughter. "That was an honourable thing to do." . Operation Easter opens in Kilmainham Gaol on Monday