Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness was at the centre of a remarkable cultural and intellectual collaboration last week between the European University Institute (EUI) and the Teatro di Cestello in Florence.
It came about because of a remark I made to a number of EUI historians who were planning a conference on the first World War with a focus on history and memory.
I mentioned that the McGuinness play was infused with the predicament of remembering as Pyper, the sole survivor of a group of eight soldiers from the 36th Ulster Division, uttered those haunting words: “I do not understand your insistence on my remembrance.”
Although I saw the play for the first and only time at the Peacock in 1985, that poignant first scene has lingered in my memory.
In October last year, I bought three copies of the play back to Florence and gave them to the historians and the EUI players, a student theatre group.
The play was translated into Italian for the first time by my language teacher, Leonardo Gandi, who found translating its rich language very rewarding although he never found a satisfactory translation for “buckcat” or “Fenian”.
Armed with the Italian translation, Rosario Campisi and Alessandra Comanducci, president and director of the Teatro di Cestello, formed a reading laboratory to explore the text with the student actors.
This led to a partially staged dramatic reading of the play in June following a keynote address by Roy Foster, professor of Irish History at Oxford, on World War and Nationalist Revolution in Ireland.
By this stage, the two Italian directors were fully immersed in the play and wanted to stage an Italian interpretation with a cast of professional actors.
Guarda i Figli dell'Ulster in Marchia verso la Somme, with English surtitles, opened on October 24th in the Teatro di Cestello for six performances.
International audience
It attracted a mixed audience of Italians and many from Florence’s international community. The Italian directors, one of whom played the old Pyper, succeeded in interpreting the play that was accessible to an audience with little knowledge of its historical context.
The minimalist staging recreated the cramped conditions of the trenches and could be adapted to the local scenes in Ulster.
Rosario Campisi as the old Pyper succeeded in conveying the torment of survival and set the scene for the events that ended on the eve of the battle of the Somme.
There were strong performances from the actors who played the eight soldiers. The young Pyper had piercing eyes and took to heart his role as the “buckcat” as he strutted the stage. The relationship between Pyper and Craig was the pivot around which the directors crafted this production.
The cast captured the play’s universal messages about war and the particular intensity of war for the men of Ulster. The emotional intensity of an identity built in opposition to an every present other is palpable in the production.
Last Saturday's evening performance was preceded by a discussion including Roy Foster and two Italian historians forged in opposition to the other on the Experiences of the first World War in Ireland and Italy.
The contributions from the three historians underlined the way in which this Great War, a truly transnational event, was experienced differently and remembered differently in various parts of Europe.
100,000 Italians
Italy
did not go sleepwalking into the war in August 1914 but discussed it for a year before finally entering in 1915. Of particular interest were the 100,000 Italians who fought for the Hapsburgs, because although they were culturally Italian, they lived on the Austrian side of the border.
The inherent ambiguity of identity, conflicting forms of allegiance and the complexity of borderlands chimed with Foster’s contribution on Ireland. He talked of the way in which memory and amnesia permeated Irish responses to the events of 1916. In Irish historical memory, the nationalist revolution won and there was a deliberate forgetting of the 40,000 or 50,000 Irish men who died in the Great War.
Seeing the play again was a reminder that Ireland is again gripped by the politics of commemoration. The main parties have done much over the last number of years to confront Irish forgetfulness about the war, to restore that part of history to our remembrance. It is no less important that they continue to claim the tradition of 1916, which was, after all, the foundational moment of the Irish State.
Ceding that political space to Sinn Féin is not smart politics. Brigid Laffan is director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence
