A Terrible Beauty is the story of the men and women of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Irish and British, caught up in a conflict many did not understand and of the innocent men and boys, executed because of what transpired in The Battle of Mount Street Bridge. The British soldiers were the last of the Great War volunteers, who joined up together to fight the Germans. They knew that there was a strong chance they would die in France, but to die in Dublin would never have crossed their minds. The Irish Volunteers were weekend warriors many of whom had no idea they were about to take part in large scale battles on the streets of Dublin.—Anonymous
The docudrama follows the course of tragic events which occurred during the six days of the Easter rising. It is centered on two very different battles-grounds, Mount St and North King St, irrevocably linked by the ferocity of the fighting and horrific violence that occurred there.
Based on the testimony of the civilian and soldiers on both sides we capture events as they unfold at Mount Street and North King Street.
From first hand accounts we reconstruct what is happening on the ground. We uncover a forgotten part of the history of 1916. From the British soldiers who were rushed from their training camps in Luton and Watford to be sent to their death on the streets of Dublin, the second city of the Empire to the Irish Volunteers who turned up on Easter Monday expecting to carry out bank holiday manoeuvres and the civilians whose lives were irrevocably changed by the fighting. The action will be broken down over six acts with each act corresponding with a day of the rising.
The docudrama opens in January 1916, when the leaders of the 1916 Rising meeting in Clontarf, Dublin, set a date for the rising. Coincidentally, the soldiers of the Sherwood Foresters who would take part in putting down the rising began their training at the British Armys training facilities in Watford.
We fast forward to Easter Monday 1916,over the course of the first two days, the action follows the rebels as they capture key positions around Dublin and barricade their positions, focusing particularly on the Mount Street Bridge the main artery for any British forces from England and the North King Street area a densely populated part of the North Dublin inner city. Across the water in England we see the mobilisation of the British forces, most of the troops totally unaware that they where going to fight on the home front. We follow their departure from their English bases for Ireland.
By Wednesday both sides are ready for action. In detail, we follow 20 hours where the young men of the Irish Volunteers at Mount St. Bridge battle with the raw half-trained soldiers of the Sherwood Foresters in the bloodiest day of the rising. We follow the battle for Mount Street through the eyes of the protagonists on both sides. This is the Irish Thermopylae, where a handful of Irish volunteers held off nearly 750 British soldier, inflicting 250 casualties on the British but where 50% of their own force was killed.
After the fierce fighting of Wednesday, Thursday is a day for the British to lick their wounds and the Irish to regroup. The South Staffordshire Regiment enters the fray, relieving the battered and bruised Sherwood Foresters, under constant sniper fire and seeing rebels in every window and behind every chimney stack they are sent into the narrow street and densely populated alleyways of the North King St area on early Friday morning. Here they undergo a baptism of fire as the well barricaded and well drilled Irish Volunteers hold off their repeated assaults.
This battleground was the British armies first experience of urban warfare. Just like today in modern Basra, Falluja or Sadr City, the defending forces had local knowledge in their favour. The British believing that locals and rebels were inseparable found the pressure too much. By Saturday morning they are taking their frustrations out on the local population. Through the words of the women of North King Street, we will tell the story of the massacres that took place during the final hours of the rising, when 15 civilian men and boys were brutally murdered at the hands of the South Staffordshire regiment. The action ends with the British, Volunteers and Civilians of Dublin counting the cost of the rising.
The 1916 Rising is the defining moment in 20th century Ireland. The leaders of the rising have become the martyred saints of the Irish state and the British the fools who won the battle but lost the country. But what of the ordinary people on both sides who got tangled up in the events of Easter Week 1916. For them the reality of the rising was far different then the heroic myth depicted in the Irish national story.
