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creative
Communities

Dates
27th Sep 2020
to 17th Oct 2020

Age Range
All ages

Venue
Podcast - Maynooth Campus Conference and Accommodation.

FRACTURED – a family, a nation, a dream…

A series of plays or ‘episodes’ spanning the period May 1920 to April 1922, depicting the effect the War of Independence and the early rumblings of the Civil War had on the inhabitants of a small Kildare town.The episodes are written in soap format, so each episode spurs the story on and we learn, a little more each episode, of the lives and loves of the Barry family. Among the fictional characters in the saga are also real people.

There are traitors, heroes, lovers and killers – high drama. But there are also the small tender moments – a workhouse child being accepted into a community, hints of a love that dare not speak it’s name, Brigid and Joseph Barry discussing the loss of their first child.
The original idea was to make the shows time-specific and site-specific and to dramatize them live. However, with Covid, we were unable to start in May 2020 with the aftermath of the bombing of Maynooth courthouse, then we took the decision to film the first year of shows. We are now going to create a podcast of the first shows – spanning from May 1920.

We hope to launch the podcast in February 1921, on the anniversary of the Maynooth ambush, not to glorify killing, but because regular listeners will realise, that every episode has lead inevitably to this point, and it will be shocking, and sad and will send the narrative (in the following year) spinning in a new direction.

We do believe the plays might be published, a gift-pack of the films be produced. 

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.

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