About the play

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In 1649 Oliver Cromwell went to Ireland with an army. Uh oh, we're betting this didn't end well for the people in Ireland. (It really didn't.) But Cromwell's thought of a hero in Britain, and the histories of the indigenous Irish continue to be erased. Fuck that noise.

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This is Brian Friel’s Translations for today. We don’t live in that world any more - it’s too civilised, too subtle. This is a brutal reworking of a Translations-style project for our brutal society now - because we need to be told exactly where culpabilities with rewritten and erased histories lie.

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This play was supported in development as part of the Act II Festival, London, under the title We Didn’t Kill the Wolves (It was Cromwell). Rehearsal and development was directed by Catherine V. Mclean, with ensemble members Mia Kitty Barbe-Wilson, Ceara Harper, Tom Hunter, Magnus Korsaeth, and Louis Vichard; additional workshops with actors from the National Youth Theatre. Act II Festival directed by Amy Tickner.

Additional development support from the MA Acting course at The Lír, Dublin (workshop led by Gavin Kostick).

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Accompanying practitioner essay ‘Revising Atrocious Cultural Histories through Theatre: Oliver Cromwell and Genocide in Ireland’ published in ARC 2020: The Dirty Issue, August 2020. 

Read the full article here: https://arcmagazine.org/pieces/external/james-ireland/

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