User:Liffeystynx/Volunteers

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Volunteers

Volunteers is a play by Irish playwright Brian Friel first produced in 1975. It is set in a contemporary Irish city which is not named but is presumably Dublin. The "volunteers" of the title are a group of paramilitary prisoners who have been enlisted to help complete an archaeological dig. The title plays on the fact that that the men's work is enforced rather than voluntary and that active members of the Irish Republican Army were referred to as "volunteers".

It is set in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1970, in the aftermath of a Roman Catholic Civil Rights meeting, and follows three protesters who mistakenly find themselves in the mayor's parlour in the Guildhall. The plight of the protesters is that their mistaken circumstance is interpreted as an 'occupation'. The play illustrates their final hours in the Guildhall, their failed escape and the tribunal into their deaths.

Following a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march on 30 January 1972 in the events now known as Bloody Sunday, in which Friel participated in, the British 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fire on the protesters which resulted in thirteen deaths. An early form of the play, having been started appoximately ten months prior to Bloody Sunday, was modified following the events of the day to entail certain links to the events.

Performance and publication
Volunteers was first performed at the at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in Ireland, on March 15th 1975.

In Australia it remains a popular set text among English and Drama & Theatre Studies secondary school students.

Plot
Lily,a forty three year old mother of eleven, Michael, a twenty two year old man (unemployed), and 'Skinner', twenty one and unemployed, are the antiheroes, who perish as British soldiers shoot them as they attempt to escape.

The main characters of the play are:


 * Michael Hegarty
 * Lily Doherty
 * 'Skinner' (Adrian Casimir Fitzgerald)