Sean McGinley plays Pyper who leads the Sons of Ulster
Following performances in the UK and Northern Ireland, the Abbey Theatre’s revival of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme – a co-production with a number of theatre companies in the UK – is now running on the Abbey’s own stage in Dublin, the place where Frank McGuinness’s bracing piece first debuted in 1985. The play centres on eight young men in the Ulster Regiment of the British Army during one of the most horrific military encounters in history, the Battle of the Somme.
In the play’s key role, Seán McGinley plays Kenneth Pyper, the group’s lone survivor who must combat the trauma of memory, both his own and that of Ulster. It’s a part that the Ballyshannon man – a pillar of Irish theatre, film, and TV for over three decades – will never forget, not least because it brought him to the Somme earlier this summer, when, on the eve of the centenary, the production was staged outdoors by the Ulster Memorial Tower in Thiepval.
