Lowe, Boss, sound designer Carl Kennedy and costume designer Niamh Lunny are smart enough to allow the house to exert its own grip. They use two high-ceilinged rooms and one claustrophobic corridor to stage three relatively short scenes that, with skilful economy, contain the history of the Lockout as experienced by the occupants of the house.

In the first, Lloyd Cooney and Eric O’Brien play two brothers who are members of Jim Larkin’s locked-out union. They are pumped up by the heady, revolutionary euphoria of the early days of the action, both repelled and excited by the violence of Bloody Sunday, when the police baton-charged peaceful citizens, and the riots that followed. For the second, we enter a darkened room in which a mother is putting two sick children to sleep in a big wrought-iron bed – an image clearly inspired by a now-famous photograph of children in a tenement interior. The mother is played, very touchingly, by Laura Murray, whose monologue is partly based on her own grandmother’s letters. It raises the darkest question of the Lockout: is it better to fight for justice while your children starve or to end the suffering by knuckling under? The third scene, in the corridor, plays out that conflict between the two brothers at the end of the Lockout, as one submits and the other insists on fighting on.

As well as being gripping and immediate, the drama is strikingly complex. It plunges us into human dilemmas – the attraction and repulsion of violence, the frightful cost of struggle, the tensions between individual and collective imperatives. It is deeply concerned with the dignity of the people it portrays, yet utterly devoid of heroic rhetoric or cheap sentiment. It shows, in 35 highly charged minutes, how memory does not have to be morbid and how thoughtful commemoration differs from mindless celebration.

Living the Lockout plays seven times a day at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1, until August 31st. dublintenementexperience.com

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