Post by Douay-Rheims-Challoner on Jan 4, 2016 15:23:12 GMT -5
Okay so every so often I make a thread about a notable Irish show and as you may have seen in the past they tend not to be very good (or my Quirke shout boxing of long ago.)
Rebellion really had every chance of not being very good - dealing with a sensitive national myth like the Easter Rebellion is precisely the kind of thing that can call for dry, dramatically moribund reverence, like how last year's Australian Gallipoli miniseries gave us the nobly suffering ANZAC soldiers and the villainously incompetent British officers. There wasn't much room for nuance, and in tugging at your heart strings, there's less for drama.
Rebellion's first episode is like a breath held a long time (echoed on the tense soundtrack) painting an image of Dublin briefly in 1914 when war was declared but primarily in early 1916, with that fateful Easter around the corner. There's no conscription in Ireland, but there are those who volunteered to serve the British army on the assumption that their service in this war would be rewarded with the Home Rule parliament they had campaigned for, or who joined it so they had the King's shilling to send home to give money to their family - the rationales of a rich and a poor man, respectively, and the divisions of class in national loyalties are one of the many different distinctions running through this episode. (If the rich fellow comes of as a bit of a sop, the episode has much more sympathy for his poorer equivalent - Teevan perhaps continuing the class concerns of his drama Charlie last year, but on an even more Dublin specific canvas.)
For our protagonist is Elizabeth Butler, an original character from a wealthy Irish family (not of the Butlers, one of Ireland's most notable post-invasion dynasties, but the comparison is almost certainly intentional) and her would be fiancé is the rich man who went to war - symbolic of the view of John Redmond and his Home Rule party which had been the dominant Irish political position before the war.
Liz, however, is with the revolutionaries and their citizen army - in secret. And it is through her we finally begin to see some of the historical figures of that movement - Countess Constance Markievicz and 'Commandant Pearse' are introduced without much fanfare, though James Connolly, whose socialist principles she shares (as her family has decidedly little interest in this kind of violent nationalism by any stripes, from her conservative mother to her cynically apathetic brother), has the most impressive introduction.
But also in here somewhere is a woman working at Dublin Castle, the heart of British operations in the country - not someone of much political disposition, but one who's the mistress of a prominent Englishman and whose loyalties are tested over the episode.
And if you're feeling lost by any of this, well, on the one hand the show is careful to label locations so you know their significance, but it doesn't really call much attention to the historical characters; the basic conflict might be understable in broad strokes or it may have too much detail, but anyway, it's a solid first episode and will be interesting to see where it goes.
Of course while the show gives a good sense of the various divisions within Dublin - impromptu singings of God Save The King at the declaration of war in Europe, Irish being spoken by the revolutionaries - that's where it ends; a passing acknowledgment of Carson and later the Ulster Volunteers is about all it has time for for the issues in the North. (I'm of the opinion the 1912 gun-running would make a great miniseries in its own right but that's another subject.)
Also a fair bit about gender - the two principles who get the most interesting stories in this episode are both women - and while Liz Butler is in some sense trying to escape the roles society puts women in through revolutionary politics, the mistress is feeling trapped by the few identities available to her.
Rebellion really had every chance of not being very good - dealing with a sensitive national myth like the Easter Rebellion is precisely the kind of thing that can call for dry, dramatically moribund reverence, like how last year's Australian Gallipoli miniseries gave us the nobly suffering ANZAC soldiers and the villainously incompetent British officers. There wasn't much room for nuance, and in tugging at your heart strings, there's less for drama.
Rebellion's first episode is like a breath held a long time (echoed on the tense soundtrack) painting an image of Dublin briefly in 1914 when war was declared but primarily in early 1916, with that fateful Easter around the corner. There's no conscription in Ireland, but there are those who volunteered to serve the British army on the assumption that their service in this war would be rewarded with the Home Rule parliament they had campaigned for, or who joined it so they had the King's shilling to send home to give money to their family - the rationales of a rich and a poor man, respectively, and the divisions of class in national loyalties are one of the many different distinctions running through this episode. (If the rich fellow comes of as a bit of a sop, the episode has much more sympathy for his poorer equivalent - Teevan perhaps continuing the class concerns of his drama Charlie last year, but on an even more Dublin specific canvas.)
For our protagonist is Elizabeth Butler, an original character from a wealthy Irish family (not of the Butlers, one of Ireland's most notable post-invasion dynasties, but the comparison is almost certainly intentional) and her would be fiancé is the rich man who went to war - symbolic of the view of John Redmond and his Home Rule party which had been the dominant Irish political position before the war.
Liz, however, is with the revolutionaries and their citizen army - in secret. And it is through her we finally begin to see some of the historical figures of that movement - Countess Constance Markievicz and 'Commandant Pearse' are introduced without much fanfare, though James Connolly, whose socialist principles she shares (as her family has decidedly little interest in this kind of violent nationalism by any stripes, from her conservative mother to her cynically apathetic brother), has the most impressive introduction.
But also in here somewhere is a woman working at Dublin Castle, the heart of British operations in the country - not someone of much political disposition, but one who's the mistress of a prominent Englishman and whose loyalties are tested over the episode.
And if you're feeling lost by any of this, well, on the one hand the show is careful to label locations so you know their significance, but it doesn't really call much attention to the historical characters; the basic conflict might be understable in broad strokes or it may have too much detail, but anyway, it's a solid first episode and will be interesting to see where it goes.
Of course while the show gives a good sense of the various divisions within Dublin - impromptu singings of God Save The King at the declaration of war in Europe, Irish being spoken by the revolutionaries - that's where it ends; a passing acknowledgment of Carson and later the Ulster Volunteers is about all it has time for for the issues in the North. (I'm of the opinion the 1912 gun-running would make a great miniseries in its own right but that's another subject.)
Also a fair bit about gender - the two principles who get the most interesting stories in this episode are both women - and while Liz Butler is in some sense trying to escape the roles society puts women in through revolutionary politics, the mistress is feeling trapped by the few identities available to her.
