All changed... and an utterly new Countess Markievicz!
YEATS wrote it out in a verse: ‘MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse’... martyrs whose voices will echo louder still in this the centenary year of that blood sacrifice.
But while they will have their explosive testosterone-fuelled moments, the first part of RTÉ’s 1916 tribute to The Rising was dedicated to Mná na hÉireann.
Rebellion’s poster girl has been Charlie Murphy and we first meet her not in that jaunty hat but as one of the three prim and proper ‘oriental ladies’ in a performance of The Mikado in 1914.
Medical student Elizabeth is in a world of privilege and position – personally she is thrust into an engagement with a man of prospects in the British Army, Stephen Duffy-Lyons (Paul Reid) while politically she acquiesces in her family’s support of the promise of Home Rule. Their drinks party after The Mikado is broken only by the ringing of bells that heralds the outbreak of war with Germany.
It is a different world into which we are thrust when we are transported two years later in the middle of the war when teacher Frances, Elizabeth’s fellow amateur thespian, is on the streets of Dublin campaigning against Irish soldiers fighting on the front.
But while Frances (Ruth Bradley) is a willing disciple of Pádraig Pearse’s (Marcus Lamb) at St Enda’s where classes are in bombmaking, Elizabeth’s revolutionary fuse is slower burning.
There is no single spark, rather a growing realisation of the cloistered drawing room existence in which she lives... and the charms of brooding Irish Citizen Army soldier Jimmy Mahon (Brian Gleeson).
All of which seems a considerably better reason to join a revolutionary cause than to have a gun thrust in your face by a tomboy soldier, masquerading as Countess Markiewicz (Camille O’Sullivan)... some way from Yeats’ description of ‘a beautiful girl in a silk kimono’.
But of the Mikado trio, Dublin Castle secretary May (Sarah Greene) is the one most in need of a fire under her... rather than the crusty assistant to the British chief secretary Charles Hammond (Tom Turner).
When she does eventually get burnt, when Mrs Hammond turns up, she lights the fuse and passes on a vital document to the rebels. It reveals that the British are about to round up Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin members and is just the spark the rebels need to get the troops out on the Easter Monday.
Rebellion is not terrible... but it remains to be seen if it can be a thing of beauty.
War And Peace is a thing of beauty... and there is none so beautiful as Princess Helene Kuragina (Tuppence Middleton), who just happens to know it too.
As does the excitable Pierre Bezukhov (Paul Dano) who is smitten with the princess when we meet him but doesn’t know what to do about it... his wealthy
father helps him by dying and leaving him the lot. Pierre suddenly goes from being invisible to the tastiest spoonful of caviar at the table.
Of course, Pierre is going to be taken for a ride... although we doubt he’ll complain. Helene’s father, Prince Vassily Kuragin, played supremely with quiet menace by Stephen Rea, has ensured that he has access to the bespectacled dreamer’s vast fortune.
All is fair in love and war, as they say, and Pierre and Helene’s story will play out with deadly consequences in future episodes. War in 19th-century Russia, as it is across the continent, is the noblest of endeavours and in Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (James Norton), Pierre’s best friend, we have a dashing hero who wishes to do his duty for Mother Russia against Napoleon but seems to have scant regard for his wife Countess Natasha Rostova whom he insensitively brushes aside publicly before heading off to war.
The hero of the opening episode, though, was neither brave soldier nor willowy maiden but a handsome, but tragic steed, Little Rook, who is shot dead from under his rider Count Nilolai Rostov (Jack Lowden) and whose passing sent that most modern of mediums, the twittersphere, into a tizzy with many calling for him to be considered for an acting award.
The equine ‘actor’ Ziggy, we have since discovered, has perfected the art of falling safely after years of training.
We hope his castmates have been paying attention... there is likely to be much more blood spilt before War ends and Peace returns.