A Terrible Beauty.... ·

A Terrible Beauty......

 1x 90/2x50 minute HD docudrama
 

The Story

They marched along tree lined Northumberland Road, cheered on by the citizens of Dublin. One thousand men of the “pals” brigade of the Sherwood Foresters. Poorly trained and poorly led they expected to be in France that morning. Perplexed at finding themselves in Dublin instead, they laughed and joked as they marched along buoyed up by the cheers of their fellow British citizens. Within hours almost 200 of the “pals” lay dead or wounded, their injuries inflicted by just 17 men of the rebel Irish Volunteers. This was the Battle of Mount Street Bridge, the 26th of April 1916.

This was the British army’s first major experience of urban warfare as two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters were marched into a withering fire of well defended enemy positions. At the height of the First World War, just months before the carnage of the Somme, the soldiers met their fate, not at the hands of the German Army in France, but during 5 days of street fighting against fellow British citizens in the second city of the British Empire, Dublin.

Many of the troops were only half way through their training. The young men of the Sherwood Foresters were not supposed to die on British soil. They are part of the hidden story of a forgotten conflict lost in the chaos of the First World War; their names are not remembered on any monument, their deaths unrecorded in the official war records, their sacrifice forgotten.

A Terrible Beauty...... is a dark story which does not sit comfortably with the traditional lionised imagery of what transpired during the rising. The first hand account of the British soldier, Irish Volunteer and civilian are interwoven, giving a fresh perspective on these key events and challenging some traditional views of what took place. We have unearthed long forgotten first-hand historical accounts of both soldiers and civilians which will provide the basis for much of the narrative. This  docudrama is unique, with the voices of the protagonists on both sides and the tragic civilians caught in the middle being heard for the first time.

The Style

The docudrama shot on HD Camera HD16:9 has been master graded to give the colours a dark muted look. Using actual first hand accounts, our characters will talk to camera as if been interviewed after the event and these sequences will be intercut with the drama, to add to the documentary “feel”. 

Existing archive has been used at the beginning and end of the programme to illustrate the major historic moments and establish the background story to the events leading up to the rising of 1916, with the scripted drama elements depicting  key events in the rising and the actions of individuals.

The story is built around eye witness accounts and the post war writings of the men and women caught up in the events of Easter 1916.  Quoting directly from both the Bureau of Military History and the Royal Commission statements our actors bring to life these long dead participants of the rising.

A Terrible Beauty......, tells the story of the rising through the eyes of the ordinary people caught up in the very real drama that played out on the streets of Dublin in April 1916. The viewer is brought  to the centre of what was happening to experience the heroism of the doomed, the futility of the deaths of so many on both sides of the conflict and the tragedy that befell the people of North King Street. Our docudrama perfectly fits the zeitgeist of the present day, when dislocated soldiers are often fighting and dying in a place they should not and did not expect to be, unsure of who the enemy is, and occasionally taking revenge on the civilian population.