Behind Martin Lynch's new play is a true story about his grandfather being handcuffed for four days to a first World War deserter who was then shot, he tells Jane Coyle

It all began at a family wedding in Dublin, about 25 years ago. The hour was late and the formal reception and speeches were long over, as brothers, sons, uncles and cousins gathered in the hotel bar to down a few pints and swap stories of the Belfast docks, where generations of Lynch men had worked.

"Most of the stories were old favourites," Martin Lynch says. "We'd heard them many times before, but every time they were told you'd get a laugh. Then my Uncle Anthony suddenly said: 'Did I ever tell you about your grandfather being handcuffed to a deserter in the first World War?' Everyone went quiet. I said: 'Say that again.' He repeated it and we all sat back, taking it in. We'd never heard this one before."

It appeared that not even Uncle Anthony knew many details of the story he'd started. But the passing remark settled in the young playwright's mind as a possible subject for a play he might write some day. And it refused to go away.

Given Lynch's large, expansive personality, one wonders why he didn't charge off and write it there and then.

"I don't know really," he says. "Maybe I was frightened of it. It's a hell of a story, and when you're dealing with something so personal and so intimate, you want to do it right."

He concedes that had he pitched straight into it all those years ago, it would probably have ended up, like several of his early plays, with a cast of thousands and goodness knows how many individual storylines, all revolving at once and all trying to find an ending. Instead, Holding Hands at Paschendale is a terse double-hander, to be performed by two fine young actors, Londoner Freddie White and Ciaran McMenamin, the talented Enniskillen actor, who is making a rare appearance on a home stage.

"Maybe it took all the years of experience, the lessons painfully learned, to hone it down to what it has become," says Lynch, who, through his company, Green Shoot, is also the producer. "Apart from two brilliant young actors - and how great is it to see Ciaran back? - we have an excellent young director in Hannah Eidinow, who has been working around the National Theatre and the RSC these past few years and won a couple of Fringe Firsts at Edinburgh. She's of Russian extraction and has more love for this play than even me! But even though we have all the right ingredients in the mix, we still have to pull it off."

And so to the content of the play and the inclusion of the iconic name of Paschendale in its title. Getting on for a century after the event, the very word continues to strike a universal chord. Over the years Lynch has gone over and over his grandfather's remarkable experience, gleaning and piecing together tiny nuggets of fact to form his starting point.

"This is as much as I know," he says. "My grandfather was a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery. He had been a batman before that. He fought at the third Battle of Paschendale, where they spent 10 days pounding the Germans in a non-stop bombardment.

"On the last day, the infantry moved in beside the guns and a young soldier, a Londoner, cracked up and said he wasn't going over. The officer in charge seized three men to arrest and subdue him. My grandfather was one of them.

"In the ensuing melee, my granda was handcuffed to the guy and, in effect, became the arresting soldier. The two of them were handcuffed together for four days and four nights. On the fifth day, the soldier was shot by a British army firing squad for refusing to fight in the face of the enemy.

"I have used my imagination to take the story on from there, to examine a relationship that began between two young men with nothing in common except that they were fighting on the same side in a brutal war. In the play, they set out knowing nothing about each other and end up knowing the most intimate details of each other's lives and experiences. They go on a journey, which changes them, both within themselves and in their perceptions of each other".

LYNCH COULD HARDLY have envisaged that the play would start production in the same month that the Shot at Dawn campaign gained the success it had been working towards for so long: the British Government's decision to pardon so-called deserters. Lynch also feels that the time is ripe for an examination of family histories, particularly within the Northern Catholic community, many of which include serving members of the British armed forces.

"In the history of my own family, there was no political tension about these things," recalls Lynch. "I had an uncle who was in the IRA campaign in the 1940s and another who fought battles with the loyalist, Buck Alec, during the sectarian conflict in Sailortown. My grandfather and his four brothers all fought in the first World War - and all came back alive. My grandfather was known as Fenian Paddy, so there was no doubt about where he was coming from.

"I would guess that an awful lot of families in Catholic Belfast have that kind of make-up. I'll bet that guys like Gerry Adams and Alex Maskey have British army connections in their families, and they have to face up to that. In those days, joining up was nothing to do with being patriotic or pro-Brit. It offered young fellas a job, square meals, employment - things which were in short supply at home. Pre-1969, it was an OK thing to do. After that, of course, it was a complete no-no."

So, after the huge and continuing commercial success of the comedy, The History of the Troubles Accordin' to my Da, which Lynch co-wrote with comic actors and writers Conor Grimes and Alan McKee, Holding Hands at Paschendale marks something of a return to his roots.

"This is my first serious drama since Pictures of Tomorrow, the play about the Spanish Civil War, which I wrote in 1994," he says. "It is about an event that took place in 1917, but it has so many parallels with where we are now. It examines the brutality of war, the use of violence for political gains and it makes the chilling point that once you have killed somebody, for whatever reason, it stays with you forever. That applies as much today as it did all those years ago."

Holding Hands at Paschendale runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, during the Belfast Festival at Queen's, from Oct 13 to Nov 4 (box office: 028-90381081)