Raging: Embargo: The War of Independence

By Deirdre Kinahan

Part of Deirdre Kinahan's trilogy of landmark plays commemorating seven years of warfare in Ireland, Embargo focuses on a pivotal moment during the Irish War of Independence.
It is September 1920. Dockers and railmen are refusing to transport armed troops or handle any weapons arriving from Britain. Three characters are caught up in the whirl of historical events in a poetic, bloody and heroic tale of industrial action and civic resistance.
Embargo was first staged by Fishamble: The New Play Company, in association with Iarnród Éireann and Dublin Port Company, in October 2020, streamed live online from the Pumphouse in Dublin Port, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Deirdre Kinahan's Raging trilogy tells powerful stories drawing on a tumultuous period of conflict in Irish history, from the 1916 Easter Rising to the Civil War which began in 1922. Each of the three plays – Wild Sky, Embargo and Outrage – was first performed a century after the event which it depicts, and they were commissioned and performed by companies including Fishamble: The New Play Company, Meath County Council Arts Office, Dublin Port Company and Iarnród Éireann.

Together, they challenge the historical narrative, mixing true-life testimonies with powerful drama to create a theatrical hurricane of empathy, action and truth.
'Unashamedly humanistic... impressive layers of nuance' - Irish Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788505857

Deirdre Kinahan

Deirdre Kinahan is an award-winning playwright and a member of Aosdána, Ireland's elected body of outstanding artists. Her plays include: An Old Song, Half Forgotten (Abbey Theatre, 2023); Outrage (Fishamble, 2022); The Visit (Draiocht, Dublin Theatre Festival 2021); The Saviour (Landmark Productions, 2021); In the Middle of the Fields (Solas Nua DC, 2021); Embargo (Fishamble 2020); Dear Ireland (Abbey Theatre, 2020); The Bloodied Field (Abbey Theatre 2020); Rathmines Road (Fishamble and Abbey Theatre, 2018); Crossings (Pentabus Theatre, 2018); The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 2018); Wild Sky (Dublin, 2016); Spinning (Fishamble, 2014); Halcyon Days (Solstice Arts Centre, Co. Meath, and Dublin Theatre Festival, 2012); and Moment (Solstice Arts Centre, Co. Meath, 2009; Bush Theatre, London, 2011).

Book preview

Deirdre Kinahan

EMBARGO

The War of Independence

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Dedication

Original Production

Author's Note

Characters

Embargo

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Deirdre Kinahan

Three plays; seven years of warfare in Ireland; and my own fifty-three years of fascination with the bloody birth of our nation.

I grew up in the shadow of one of the major players in the 1916 revolution, Padraig Pearse. I used to play in the grounds of his mother’s house, racing across the fields and climbing the bizarre follies that dot the parklands of what was his extraordinarily progressive Gaelic school at the turn of the century: St Enda’s, Rathfarnham. I literally lived ten minutes’ walk from his home. I used to cycle along the stony paths through the woods of the grounds, play roly-poly on the small hill next to the old classrooms, peer in the window at the old desks and dusters, wondering ‘What was it all like back then?’ I was always one for ‘What was it all like back then?’! When my young friends wanted to play Red Rover or rounders, I might suggest a game of Henry VIII killing all his wives, or Anne Devlin refusing to rat out Robert Emmet when captured in Kilmainham Jail. The centuries always disappeared for me, and the stories grew and grew in my imagination. So to have a voice in Ireland’s commemoration of her revolution is honestly one of the greatest privileges and the greatest thrills of my writing career.

I was, however, initially wary of the ‘history’ play. It is a tricky beast. It can be didactic, overloaded with information or worse still… boring! So when Meath County Council asked me to write a play inspired by the events of the 1916 Easter Rising I was both delighted and a little nervous. Considering every Irish household has a story of brutal murder, deliberate starvation by local English landlords, or Granny hiding guns in her knickers to keep them safe from British soldiers, I wondered how Irish households might react to the actual truth of the period.

Similarly, there is the tragic reality of continued warfare in Northern Ireland; a rump state created in the midst of that time; and then, of course, Ireland’s strong culture of celebrity historians, professional historians, amateur historians, extremely vocal historians who might take great offence at the free imaginings of a playwright dancing on their turf! But I have always believed one has to put fear in one’s pocket when writing anything for public consumption so off I danced, sporting for a good old jig with Ireland’s ghosts.

***

Wild Sky was the first play – and where I learned how to tackle history in my own way. The play is pure fiction, but like all art it grows out of real human experience, human passion, human story. It is my attempt to turn back the clock, to walk the roads, to feel the heat, and dream the dreams that brought about Easter 1916. It is a play about radicalisation, what draws the young to revolution, what brings about the scream for change. Written through the prism of three ordinary, young, rural