2016 - 2019
Rebellion is a two-part Irish historical drama from RTÉ, co-produced with SundanceTV, commemorating the centenary of the Easter Rising. The first miniseries, five episodes released in January 2016, covers the Rising itself in Dublin. The sequel, Resistance, arrived in 2019 with another five episodes and jumped forward to 1920, dropping the same characters into the Irish War of Independence. Both were created and written by Colin Teevan.
The premise is straightforward and, for an Irish audience, loaded. Instead of centring on Michael Collins or Pádraig Pearse or any of the other names on statues, the show follows three young women whose lives collide with the Rising from three very different class positions. Elizabeth Butler, a Trinity-educated Anglo-Irish daughter drawn into republican politics through love. May Lacy, a secretary at Dublin Castle sleeping with her married English boss. Frances O'Flaherty, a committed Irish Citizen Army volunteer who actually picks up a rifle. The real leaders are there. Pearse in the GPO. James Connolly wounded and barking orders. Constance Markievicz in uniform at St Stephen's Green. But they are the background. The foreground is women, and that is the show's whole argument.
Charlie Murphy as Elizabeth Butler is the load-bearing performance. She has to sell a woman walking away from privilege toward a cause her family considers treasonous, and Murphy plays it without any of the righteous-conversion clichés that wreck this kind of story. Elizabeth is uncertain, naive in places, capable in others, always recognisably a person rather than a symbol.
Ruth Bradley as Frances O'Flaherty gets the most physical role. Frances is already radicalised when we meet her and spends the week of the Rising shooting at British soldiers from rooftops and barricades. Bradley is the one on screen with the rifle, and she carries it convincingly. I bought it. Sarah Greene as May Lacy is the one whose loyalties are hardest to read. May is not fighting for Ireland. She's trying to survive a Dublin in which her lover is an enemy officer and her brothers are going out with the Volunteers. Greene plays the compression of that beautifully.
The men orbit these three. Brian Gleeson as Jimmy Mahon is a tram driver whose family is pulled in two directions. His brother Arthur, played by Peter McDonald in the first series, has gone to France with the British Army. Paul Reid plays Stephen Duffy Lyons, Elizabeth's fiancé, who has his own reasons for being in the GPO. Michelle Fairley and Ian McElhinney play the Butler parents, an unhappy marriage of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, and the casting alone signals how seriously RTÉ took this thing. Marcus Lamb plays Pádraig Pearse and Camille O'Sullivan plays Constance Markievicz. Both are sketched rather than excavated, but neither performance embarrasses the history.
Marcus Lamb
Pádraig Pearse
Michelle Fairley
Dolly Butler
Camille O'Sullivan
Constance Markievicz
Sarah Greene
May Lacy
Charlie Murphy
Elizabeth Butler
Brian Gleeson
Jimmy Mahon
David Wilmot
Paddy Mahon (Resistance)
Gavin Drea
Michael Collins (Resistance)
Resistance brings much of that cast forward into 1920. Gavin Drea turns up as Michael Collins. Brian Gleeson's Jimmy is now IRA and the centre of the sequel. David Wilmot plays his brother Paddy, a Dublin Metropolitan Policeman caught on the wrong side of a war his own family is fighting.
The full ensemble across both miniseries:
The Easter Rising is taught in Ireland as origin myth and in Britain as footnote. Rebellion is not particularly interested in either version. What Teevan writes is the week as a civic collapse, seen from the streets and the tenements and the drawing rooms simultaneously. Women are the spine of the story because women, historically, did most of the unglamorous work of the Rising and most of the telling of it afterwards, and Irish television had spent a century cutting them out.
The show is also very clear-eyed about class. Elizabeth's republicanism costs her nothing that she cannot afford to lose. Frances' costs her family. May's is not even republicanism, it is simply what happens when the country you live in goes to war with itself and takes your life with it. The three-women structure is not symbolic tidying. It is an argument about who the Rising was for and who paid for it.
Resistance extends the argument into the War of Independence, where the moral arithmetic changes. By 1920 this is not a week of rooftop skirmishes in Dublin. It is an intelligence war. Ambushes and informers, and execution squads on both sides. Teevan resists the temptation to make Collins a saint. He is charismatic and effective and the show refuses to soften him, and the IRA he runs does things the writing does not sanitise.
Visually, Rebellion is plainer than the prestige-TV comparison its SundanceTV pairing invited. The budget is RTÉ-sized, not HBO-sized, and you can feel it around the edges. A crowd scene that could use a hundred more extras, a street dressed to look like 1916 O'Connell Street doing the work of a whole city. What the show has instead is authenticity. It was shot in Dublin, the accents are local, the period costuming and small detail work (rifles, newspapers, Volunteer uniforms, Dublin Castle interiors) are exact.
The direction from Aku Louhimies in series one is unshowy and works the better for it. Handheld in the fighting sequences. Long static takes in the political scenes where three people in a room are deciding someone's death. Resistance has a different visual register, more noir, more shadow, more closed doors. The shift fits the material. Open street battle in 1916 becomes counter-intelligence in 1920.
Rebellion drew enormous audiences in Ireland when it aired and a more divided reception from critics. The Irish Times was generally positive. Some historians pushed back on specific dramatisations, which is what historians do. The bigger argument was political. Any television retelling of 1916 in a centenary year was going to be picked over line by line, and it was.
Resistance landed more quietly three years later. SundanceTV had moved on. The sequel is, if anything, the better of the two. Tighter, more confident, with Teevan more sure of which characters are worth his time. It did not travel as widely as series one and is the thing most international viewers miss, which is a shame.
The wider point. Rebellion did something Irish television had not really done at scale before. It treated a national myth as drama rather than as liturgy. It cast women as the subject rather than the chorus. And it was willing to be ambivalent about the leaders and the cause.
I came to Rebellion expecting a reverent pageant and found something more careful than that. The show is not flawless. Series one takes an episode to find its feet, some of the historical-figure cameos feel like check-box work, and the budget occasionally shows. But the central three-women structure is genuinely ambitious, the performances from Murphy, Bradley and Greene are the real thing, and Teevan's writing never loses sight of the fact that 1916 was a week in which real people died in real streets and most of them were not famous. That is the show I wanted to watch.
If you came to this from Peaky Blinders, the post-1919 politics of the Shelby family are the same politics Resistance is dramatising from the Dublin end. If Kin is your only other window on Irish television drama, Rebellion is the prestige-period-piece cousin with the same city as its backdrop and a lot more class feeling. And if you rate Chernobyl for what a five-episode miniseries can do with a historical event and a small canvas, the scale and the ambition here are comparable, even if the budget is not.
For all its rough edges, this is a serious piece of Irish television that actually takes 1916 seriously as a story rather than as a sermon.
Peter McDonald
Arthur Mahon
Ruth Bradley
Frances O'Flaherty
Paul Reid
Stephen Duffy Lyons
Ian McElhinney
Edward Butler