http://www.irishcentral.com/topics/Paul+Nugent IrishCentral Paul Nugent en-us http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/irish-media-nation/who-speaks-for-ireland-rebel-voices-in-blood--dancing-at-lunacy-142929315.html http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/irish-media-nation/who-speaks-for-ireland-rebel-voices-in-blood--dancing-at-lunacy-142929315.html Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:00:14 PDT
The sign at The Cell Theater entrance warns “TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE OF ‘BLOOD’ AND ‘DANCING AT LUNACY’ CONTAINS THE SOUNDS OF GUNFIRE”Take that as a sign that there’ll be none of the season’s shamrock and leprechaun sentimentality, so brace yourself for a riveting duet of dramas on rebellious Ireland, each built around a trio of all-too-human, and in one case, quite inhuman, revolutionaries  “Blood” by rocking Renaissance man Larry Kirwan, conjures a likely scenario for a mystery of the history in the run-up to the 1916 Easter Rising, while the aptly named “Dancing at Lunacy” tells of a helter-skelter clash of IRA operatives in an illegal drinking club in Belfast of 1984The opener, “Blood,” is a story of three key historical figures of the Easter Rising told in three scenes, the first brief vignette set in 1916 in Kilmainham Jail where, bound to a chair, is James Connolly (Ciaran Byrne)--common man, communist, head of the Irish Citizen Army—ruing the day he allied with his co-conspirators in the failed Easter Rising, cursing the Irish people who failed to rally to the cause:“Shower of bastards - spittin' at us and spatterin' us with horseshite as we were frog-marched out of the GPO and into this hellhole!”Scene Two goes the heart of the drama, a flashback to 1913 when Connolly disappeared, held in secret for three days by the rival Irish Republic Brotherhood READ MORE ]]>