Jadotville play planned for Westmeath stage next year

A play is being developed about the Siege of Jadotville and its aftermath, with the aim of having it staged in Mullingar Arts Centre towards the latter part of next year.

The idea for the play originated a number of months ago, and some veterans of the 1961 conflict in the Congo have been interviewed as part of the writing process for it.

A Netflix film, The Siege of Jadotville, was released in 2016 but the upcoming play is believed to be the first theatrical production it has inspired.

The director of the Mullingar centre, Sean Lynch, confirmed that the wheels were in motion for the staging of what he said would be "a major drama piece".

The writer and theatre director Michael Scott, who worked with Mullingar Arts Centre on its production of The Valley of the Squinting Windows, said the Jadotville play would have a cast of up to 30 people and would incorporate multimedia elements such as video footage and music.

He said it would be focused less on the military engagement and more on the human stories which emerged in its aftermath.

"We've already spent about half a year doing work on it, researching it, and I've been meeting people and doing recorded interviews," Mr Scott told the Westmeath Independent last week.

"It's going to be about what happened to people when they came back from Jadotville. We're not really interested in staging a battle - you can do that better on film.

"We're interested in the emotional events at the moment when this is happening, and the subsequent moments when they all came back (to Ireland) and were told that they were cowards."

He pointed out that wives and partners of the men serving in Jadotville had been told that the men had been killed there, only to later find out that this was not the case.

It's expected that the play will explore questions such as, "what happened to those wives? How did those wives feel at those moments? When they saw their husbands being demonised by everyone when they came back how did that affect them? What were the scars left by it?"

"Why did everybody want to bury it afterwards? Why were they so reluctant to give people their due?" he said.

Mr Scott explained that the play was likely to be further developed at the workshopping stage next Spring, with a view to having it ready for audiences "around October or November of 2024".

Many of the 156 Irish peacekeeping soldiers involved in the battle of Jadotville were from the Athlone area. The presentation of An Bonn Jadotville, the Jadotville medal, to the veterans and their families took place at Custume Barracks in the town in 2017.