Guest Blog: Playwright Lizzie Nunnery On TO HAVE TO SHOOT IRISHMEN

In January 1917, four months after the murder of her husband, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington smuggled herself in to America with her eight-year-old son, Owen. As she'd previously been imprisoned for smashing the windows of Dublin Castle in suffragist protest, the British government wouldn't give her a passport.

But she was so determined to tell the world what had happened to her husband Frank at the hands of a British soldier, she risked further imprisonment and travelled by secret means to New York, then journeyed state to state giving lectures.

Everywhere she went she repeated the terrible facts: how Frank was seized from the streets, arrested without charge, murdered in secret, buried in the ground; how his murderer then broke into and raided her house.

She spoke of all this over and over. She talked to journalists, politicians, to President Wilson himself. She kept saying her husband's name, his story and hers, over and over, in the hope she would eventually by heard.

You could say that America listened. Hanna was certainly believed and treated with respect. But the real targets of her campaign remained oblivious or immovable. Her husband's murderer, Captain John Bowen Colthurst, was never tried in an ordinary court. He was never convicted of murder, never discharged from the British army.

Hanna was up against it. She was Irish and an enemy of the establishment, and what's more she was female: merely somebody's wife. For Hanna, it must have felt ultimately that she was shouting into a void.

Ninety-one years later I was sitting in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, with Hanna's American lecture notes spread out before me. My stomach tightened as her poised, unwavering voice bounded off the page, as the details of her harrowing experience gained shape in my mind. That these events were little remembered in Ireland, and almost entirely unknown in Britain, served as a spur.

But the thing that made my skin tingle was their resonance. This story spoke so loudly and timelessly about the dehumanising effect of organised violence. Through the pages before me, Hanna was still propounding her message of equality, freedom and pacifism.

Had Hanna's voice been a little less persistent, perhaps I wouldn't have spent the next ten years in pursuit of a play. But for better or worse, she'd recruited me.

At first, it was easy. The story and characters were there for the taking. Irish theatre company Druid commissioned the script and I travelled to Galway, Dublin and Washington researching and workshopping the play.

But when Druid cut the script loose in 2011, and I failed to find another home for it, I was forced to move on to other paid writing work. The script sat unfinished and untouched for five years, and I was in serious danger of breaking my secret pact with Hanna.

Sometime in 2016, I was jogging around my local park in Liverpool, for the thousandth time thinking about the play, when Hanna seemed to speak directly in my ear: 'Why don't you just do it yourself?'

There were lots of good reasons not to. I'd never produced a play before. Myself and writer Lindsay Rodden had a small company, Almanac, through which we'd put on cross-arts events in the North-West, but this... this would need to be bigger.

It would need to travel further, speak louder. And we'd need a pretty big team to pull it off. The sensible thing would've been to put the thought out of my head and keep jogging.

Instead, I sent the script to director and friend Gemma Kerr, and together we began a campaign: we started telling Hanna and Frank's story over and over to anyone who'd listen, repeating their names and the name of the play in the hope that something would spark.

It took a lot of conversations (venues, funders, advisors, sponsors, artists...) but slowly, slowly we gained comrades. We assembled a team dominated by bold, passionate and indefatigable women, and toady, 10 years and 13.5 drafts since I first encountered Hanna, we'll start rehearsals.

One hundred and one years after Hanna stowed away on that boat for New York, we'll stand up... and speak.

To Have To Shoot Irishmen will premiere at the Omnibus Theatre 2-20 October, then tours until 6 November

Photo credit: Andy Donovan

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