Arts centre work on Jadotville ‘a tapestry of anguish’ – Scott

“I would call the show a tapestry of anguish,” director Michael Scott says of ‘Jadotville, the Untold Story’, the production he is working on for Mullingar Arts Centre.

Michael was conducting workshops in Mullingar over the weekend with members of the cast (not yet finalised) and he took a short break on Sunday afternoon to discuss the work with the Westmeath Examiner.

He said the production is “the story of what happened to the guys when they came back”.

“It’s not about doing a bang-bang battle on the stage; it’s about talking and investigating, portraying the trauma and the anguish and the disappointment and the ‘confussion’ – rather than confusion – of what happened to everybody when they came back.”

Asked to explain that term, Michael said “it’s not confusing, but there’s a kind of an obfuscation of the details by the government, the army, and the UN”.

Many questions concerning events at the Siege of Jadotville in 1961 remain unanswered, and Michael offered these: “Why were the guys when they came back told they were all cowards?

“Why did they refuse to give them medals? Why did they refuse to honour the guys? Why did it take John Goodman till 2016 to get a proper investigation into the events of the battle? Why did nobody mention it? Why have they still not got the medals? Although the government has agreed to do them, and they still haven’t got them. They got a commendation, but why has it taken so long?

“Half the people in the army, you ask them, why it happened, they say, because they surrendered. The guys themselves call it a ceasefire, not a surrender. Others say the problem was they all came back alive. If they’d all come back dead, they’d have been heroes, but they didn’t. They came back alive, and it’s a deep embarrassment.”

In his research for the theatre project, Michael has interviewed a number of the surviving Jadotville veterans, and relatives, including Leo Quinlan, son of Pat Quinlan, and it’s from those that he arrived at the term “a tapestry of anguish”.

“It’s a portrait of not just painful memories, but a portrait of continued survival, because they survived the battle – but the battle they’ve had since then has been even worse on them and their families than the five days in Jadotville. That has left many of them crippled emotionally. It has affected their families. That endures. It’s PTSD.”

The director, who has been commissioned by Mullingar Arts Centre for this project, intends to use some of the techniques he successfully employed in the arts centre production of The Valley of the Squinting Windows.

He said: “It’s a matter of creating a patchwork of memories, a patchwork of ideas, and doing it in a modern, digital way. We have a number of video walls in this show. It’s like watching a movie of ideas, a TikTok event, an Instagram event, a Facebook page, and a play all at the same time.”

“We’ve experimented with digital media and it is deliberately intrusive in the characters’ personalities and into their stories. The video frames things you see in a different way. So you see two or three perspectives of something.

"In this show, a lot of the time, there are two timelines running – there’s 1961 and there’s various times in the present, and those timelines sometimes run concurrently and intermix. And the audience can make the connections between those things. That’s the purpose.”

During the weekend workshops, Declan Power, whose book on Jadotville was the basis for the film, and Paul Whelan, ex-army, and who will play the piano during the show, spoke to the team about military matters in the interests of accuracy.

The script is in development, but it is written without names, bar that of Pat Quinlan, Michael said.

“I’m avoiding it being any one person, and yet it is everybody’s story simultaneously. One character might have three different people’s memories mixed in.”

When Sean Lynch, director of Mullingar Arts Centre, first suggested the idea to Michael, he was unsure, but he soon embraced the challenge of telling the Jadotville story on stage.

“As I worked further into it, I discovered exactly what the story is. And it’s one of deep disappointment, pain, anguish, mental strife, and, as I said, an obfuscation, a blurring of details. There is a massive political blurring on every facet of the whole story.”