“I WAS hooked by the irony of a pacifist being caught up in this terror,” says writer Lizzie Nunnery of her new play To Have to Shoot Irishmen. It looks back to the days following the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and the British army’s murderous hunt for the leaders of the Irish Citizen Army and their supporters.

Among them was Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, pacifist and writer, who was kidnapped and murdered alongside many other combatants as well as unarmed civilians, including women and children.

Over the last decade, Nunnery has become interested in the women involved in the rising and particularly Sheehy-Skeffington's wife Hanna. A suffragette and Sinn Feiner, she was a more prominent activist than her husband and after his murder she escaped to the US with her young son to expose the shocking brutality and terror playing out in Ireland.

“Her own grief was put aside,” according to Margaret Ward in her book on Hanna. “As she says in her memoir, 'Sometimes it is harder to live for a cause than die for it. It would be a poor tribute to my husband if grief were to break my spirit. It shall not do so’.”

In recreating the events surrounding the Easter Rising, Nunnery wanted to explore not just Sheehy-Skeffington’s story but those of other protagonists, including William, a British soldier who guarded her, and Frances Vance, the British officer who tried unsuccessfully to get the British authorities to intervene.

Nunnery is an accomplished singer-songwriter and songs are an important part of this new production. “There are lots of them, woven together from that time and given new arrangements,” she says.

This is not Nunnery’s first play about Ireland and the Irish. After reading English at Oxford, she returned to Merseyside and became involved in the Young Writers' Group at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool.

Her first play Intemperance, set in the city in 1854, is about the lives of the impoverished Irish underclass. Following its success, Nunnery was approached by Liverpool Irish Festival to curate No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish, a night of dance, drama and live music about the links between Liverpool’s black and Irish community.

This has led to a decade-long relationship between Nunnery and the festival and To Have to Shoot Irishmen will be performed there after it runs at London's Omnibus Theatre from October 2-20. A national tour follows.

It will surely have an impact because To Have to Shoot Irishmen reflects not just the past history of British colonial history in Ireland but the ongoing campaign by the families of the Ballymurphy 11 who are calling for justice for their relatives murdered during a British army operation in Belfast in 1973.

Thus the events in the play seem shockingly familiar.

“It explores fractured national identity and the chaotic legacy of British military intervention,” says Nunnery.

“It’s a story that bridges the Irish Sea, a show that draws together song, drama and storytelling, that asks important questions and doesn’t flinch.”

To Have to Shoot Irishmen runs at Omnibus Theatre, Clapham, from October 2 – 20, Liverpool Everyman Theatre (as part of Liverpool Irish Festival) from October 25-27, Marlowe Theatre Canterbury, October 30, Theatre Severn Shrewsbury, November 1-2, Mumford Theatre Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, November 5 and The Arts Centre at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, November 6.