Next Thursday is the 200th anniversary of the death of Wolfe Tone, and the occasion is marked by RTE with the broadcast of an unusual new drama. The Officer from France is scripted by Belfast writer Gary Mitchell, whose play, A Little World of Our Own, was named Best New Play at last year's Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards. Mitchell was commissioned last year to write the channel's first fully studio-based, in-house drama in almost 15 years, and the first to be shot in digital widescreen format.
"RTE told me they were planning to do a drama on Wolfe Tone, and asked would I be interested in writing it," says Mitchell, currently writer in residence at the National Theatre in London. "I knew next to nothing about Tone - where I come from, he's seen as an IRA man. So I had to do loads of research, which was the first time I'd done something like that. I was reading his diaries and thinking about how nobody I grew up with knows about this stuff. Maybe they were taught about it in the grammar schools, but not in my school.
"One of the bizarre things about doing this research was that you started to realise that all the same arguments are happening today, maybe not in the South but certainly in the North."
Under the direction of Tony Barry, The Officer from France is a striking-looking production, set against Brien Vahey's almost stylised prison set, which dramatises many of the issues surrounding the 1798 Rebellion in an imaginative fiction.
In Mitchell's script, the imprisoned Tone (played by Adrian Dunbar) rehearses his trial arguments with his fellow-convicts, some of whom share his beliefs, others of whom have a completely different understanding of what the rebellion was about, and others still who are bitterly disillusioned with the outcome.
"It's striking for me how people in different parts of the country seemed to be fighting for completely different objectives," he says.
"It's hard for me to think that the most radical thinkers of the day were Presbyterians, although since writing this I've talked to Presbyterians who argue that that tradition still exists in their community."
This is Mitchell's first full-scale drama for television, and he admits he was taken aback by the restrictions imposed by the budget. "Tony Barry and myself wanted to do this huge thing, partly because I wanted to show off all the research I'd done, but I soon realised that wasn't going to be possible. I knew that RTE would have limited resources, but there's a difference between limited and none, and between low-budget and low-low budget. So we basically had to tear up that first draft."
But it wasn't just budgetary reasons that led to the drama's almost abstract, quite theatrical format, he explains. "I had this idea of setting it in prison in the days leading up to his death. We had spent a lot of time discussing the politics of it and how people would react to that now, so this gave me an opportunity to have characters representing the thinking of people like Russell and McCracken without being tied to specific historical characters and their positions."
The Officer from France is on RTE 1 next Thursday at 10.10 p.m.