Shooting Gallery provides an alternative history of 1916. Sara Keating watches a rehearsal.

Sitting on a folding chair in a partially reconstructed period drawing room in Dublin's north inner city, watching rehearsals for Bedrock Production's latest play, seems both appropriate and ironic; the decor and location evoke a simultaneous sense of Dublin past and Dublin present that unwittingly echoes the play's central concerns.

The room in which the writers, actors and director have been meeting for the past three weeks could well be the room in Rathmines where the action is set, while the streetscape outside shows glimpses of scenes not unlike the one I have just seen enacted, as the voracious appetite of an addict is satiated with the squeeze of a belt, the slap of a vein and the sigh of obliterated pleasure.

Shooting Gallery, an historical comedy which re-situates the drama of the 1916 Rising in the living room of a pair of middle-class Republican opium addicts with a serious supply problem, may be a re-imagining of the past, but it is undoubtedly shot through with a contemporary perspective that not only sheds light on the changing nature of Ireland's relationship with her national history, but on her relationship with present reality, too.

Speaking to co-writer and performer Arthur Riordan and director Jimmy Fay after my privileged preview is unnerving; in fact it is almost as unnerving as being the single audience member, knowing that my ill-timed laughter might have punctured a dramatic climax destined for a killer punchline, though it seems to have confirmed the success of the scene's manipulation of the dramatic pause.

Fay and Riordan are in "rehearsal mode" and initially seem reluctant to talk. That the third party in this collaborative production - original ideas man, Des Bishop, who approached Riordan with the concept more than two years ago after the critical success of their previous collaboration with Fay on Rap Éire - is not present is almost a relief, even if it shifts the balance of the interview.

In the name of objectivity it seems quite appropriate that it is Fay, the omniscient eye that has supervised the project since its conception, who seems most comfortable talking about the way in which the project has developed over the past two years. Fay describes his involvement in the early stages of the project as practical.

Approached with a simple treatment, his initial function was securing funding for the commission of both writers. Once this hurdle was overcome, he graduated to a supervisory role that was just as difficult; namely, "staying on their backs and trying to lasso them together, as they've both become hugely successful since we worked together on Rap Éire - Des as a stand-up and Arthur with Improbable Frequency".

Fay himself has recently enjoyed a similar measure of critical success with the twinned theatrical offering of Urban Ghosts, which ran at this year's Fringe Festival and featured an obscure dramatic treatise by Austrian playwright Peter Handke, and a visceral visual theatre piece devised by Fay in collaboration with his performers and Bedrock dramaturge Alex Johnston.

Moving so quickly from the allusive dramatic worlds of Urban Ghosts to the richly realistic world of Shooting Gallery was a minor obstacle for Fay, but it was this urgency itself which has ensured the completion the project; it has always been the impending deadline that has kept it from spiralling in to what Fay calls "development hell".

A fixed production date and a four-week rehearsal period gives writers, directors, and actors a clear objective: "We need to open next week and it needs to be a good show."

Wresting the finished script from Bishop and Riordan, meanwhile, presented a different set of problems. While Rap Éire was largely written during the rehearsal period, with Bishop and Riordan rehearsing in the afternoon and returning home to write lyrics and lines as the need arose, Shooting Gallery was to be a tightly scripted farce with fully developed characters and a plot that needed cathartic resolution.

Finding a unified narrative voice for the play from two idiosyncratic writers was a process of refining and rewriting, but even when their voices and visions blended seamlessly into a finished script, where even Bishop and Riordan lost track of who had written what scene or line, it still wasn't wrapped up.

Riordan, somewhat more comfortable talking as an actor than as a writer, and certainly more shy than his commanding stage presence would suggest, will admit complicity. He puts it down to the difficulty in separating his two roles, whose overlap at inconvenient moments - namely in the rehearsal room - can prove frustrating.

"I have this huge temptation to change my own lines as I'm going, which kind of understandably annoys everybody else, as they stand there looking through their scripts. It's wrong of me to do it, but it kind of saves time at that particular moment, and if there's a really helpful line that would make the story clearer if I just said that, why stop the rehearsal just to say so?"

This conflicting sense of self-exasperation and creative righteousness is amusing, and not so distant from the range of emotions that flicker through the scenes in the farcical exploration of the conflicting passion and poison of patriotic fervour that fuels the play's revision of the events of 1916.

Fay admits that it was the potential of the finished product to present "another angle on a very well-known period of history" that really attracted him to Bishop and Riordan's proposal in the first place.

Opium addiction, for example, was very much part of the period, while it was middle-class Republicans, not the working classes, who formed the (minority) support for the rebellion; in fact the lack of active popular commitment was what ultimately doomed the Rising to failure.

One of the middle-class characters in Bishop and Riordan's play, in fact, has walked in from The Plough and the Stars, O'Casey's paean to the plight of the Dublin working classes during a somewhat elitist struggle for Irish Freedom. While the Woman from Rathmines is usually cut from most stage versions of the play - she does not really suit its political purposes - she is given an important role in Shooting Gallery, albeit one that variously belies her origins in the O'Casey classic. It is a more significant dramatic debut for the anonymous lady, however, and one which complements the play's suggestion that if Irish history persuades us to look at certain events from a particular angle, it is the artist's responsibility to tell the story otherwise.

Where Rap Eire was a satire of contemporary Ireland, Shooting Gallery is a more subtle send-up of a particular Irish historical moment and the way in which a particular version of national history has taught us to understand both the past and our present place in the world.

The oblique way in which these issues feed the play is similar to the way in which Improbable Frequency opened up questions about the politics of Ireland's neutrality, and the way in which Bishop's comedy masks a commitment to social activism.

Even the form of the play reflects its dual contemporary/historical concern, as a one-room drawing room farcical comedy. While Fay was initially less enamoured with this concession, he "began to see the wisdom; that by using conventions of the time as well - bringing the politics in, bringing the metaphors in - you can watch it almost in two ways, as a farce and as a drama." Despite the humour, "you're dealing with drugs and addiction and republicanism and dying for a cause and getting high on that".

But that's how classic farce finds its fuel, by placing pertinent political issues alongside an exaggerated stage version of human behaviour. Riordan suggests that humour provides the most effective way into these issues: "by playing with received notions . . you can see things as you've never seen them before."

With a gun-toting Cathleen Ní Houlihan, two Republican opium addicts and a wealth of mock-heroic mantras to draw from at the most inappropriate times, Shooting Gallery juxtaposes gravity and frivolity with a reckless rambunctious abandon that is bound to change dramatic, if not historical, perspectives of the 1916 Rising forever. But Bishop and Riordan aren't rewriting history; they are merely shifting the balance.

Shooting Gallery opens at Andrews Lane tonight and runs until Oct 29