Chronicles of Long Kesh is one of the best shows on the Fringe this year. A powerful two-hour drama, it is about the infamous prison in Northern Ireland in which members of the IRA were interned without trial - never knowing their release date.
With much humour and interspersed with Tamla Motown songs, sung by members of the cast, it is written by the Belfast writer Martin Lynch who did a huge amount of research for the play even interviewing thirty ex-prisoners.
Brought up a Catholic, he reckons one in ten people in Northern Ireland have had some connection with Long Kesh/Maze prison and he can remember the precise day internment was introduced. "If you want to put a date on when normal life in this part of the world ended it was internment morning, August 9th, 1971"
It is a very demanding role for the six excellent actors in the cast who are all on stage (bar two minutes) for the duration of the show - Billy Clarke, Jo Donnelly, Chris Corrigan, Marty Maguire, Marc O'Shea, and Andy Moore.
With large heavy wooden boxes as props, which are used as a flexible set, they play a variety of characters involved in the Long Kesh story - the prisoners, wives, prison officers, loyalists and republicans.
Bursting with energy right from the start, the play immediately engages us with humorous, and at times, harrowing tales of those affected by the "troubles" and life in the Maze.
Insisting that the Thatcher government should treat the republican inmates as "prisoners of war" with a different regime from ordinary criminals, they refused to wear prison clothes and in an endeavour to get the British government to recognise their statues they carried out "dirty protests" and ultimately some chose to go on a hunger strike. Bobby Sands was the first to die in 1981. Nine other men followed.
Their endeavours were rewarded however and on Good Friday, April 10, 1998, the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement made provisions for the resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict. The principal negotiators were ex IRA Members Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams.
Martin Lynch feels "it's now safe...to report what happened" in the Maze prison in the seventies and eighties and indeed this may well be the appropriate time for audiences to hear the Chronicles of Long Kesh. The British public is becoming more politicised as a result of injustices being frequently reported and the audience who was at this show were so appreciative of the production that the actors got a raucous, well deserved, standing ovation.
The run is now concluded