Panel Paper: “Something Worth Striving For”: Adapting James Plunkett’s The Risen People for New Politics and New Media in 2013: Panel 1a: Politics, Activism, Intervention

In 2013, the Abbey Theatre marked the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout with a new version of James Plunkett’s stage play, The Risen People. A mixture of fiction and historical fact, the ideas and stories in The Risen People were first explored in a radio play for Radió Éireann in 1954, entitled Big Jim. As described by the poet Thomas Kinsella, “It is Justice, no mere abstraction but something worth striving for, which is the ‘Hero’ of Big Jim.” This quest for Justice has been explored through various different incarnations; the success of the radio play led to it being adapted for the stage in the Abbey Theatre as The Risen People in 1958, which then opened up a publication deal that allowed Plunkett to expand his ideas into the panoramic novel Strumpet City, which would later appear as a popular RTÉ mini-series in 1980. I wish to consider this continuum of adaptations in specific reference to the political dramaturgical strategies of the 2013 Abbey production of The Risen People. I believe a reflexive relationship to the various other adaptations of Plunkett’s story allowed Jimmy Fay to exert an unusually strong editorial hand as director (including the addition of a new character, the prostitute Lily Maxwell, who appears in Strumpet City but not in The Risen People), thanks in part to the popular familiarity and affection for Plunkett’s work. I also wish to consider how the Abbey also made efforts to adapt the mode of performance to foster a dialogue with the contemporary political moment, with the innovative inclusion of a “Noble Call” after each performance, whereby an artist, intellectual, or polemicist was invited onstage after the curtain call to respond to the themes and politics of the play. Of particular interest is how a video of the now-famous “I Check Myself” Noble Call by the drag artist Panti Bliss on the 1st February 2014 subsequently went viral, thereby allowing Plunkett’s quest for Justice to transcend the Abbey stage and foster a global debate.