Between the years 1691 and 1750 more than 450,000 Irishmen died in the service of France (Abbe MacGeoghagan)
A ballad opera on the history of the Irish Brigade in the service of France from the Treaty of Limerick (1691) to the decline of the Stuart cause in the 1750s
PROLOGUE
At the Court of Irish History
PART 1: The Road to Limerick
PART 2: Swordsmen of France
EPILOGUE: Soldiering On
Written by Francis Dillon
Music composed and arranged by Tristram Cary
with the Ambrosian Singers
The cast includes Alan Barry, Dominic Behan, Kenneth Dight, Rio Fanning, Denys Hawthorne, Robert Irwin, Haydn Jones, Barry Keegan, Jack MacGowran, Kerry Marsh, Robert Mooney, Brian O'Higgins, James Page, P.G. Stephens, Harry Towb, Michael Turner and Norman Wynne
Produced by Francis Dillon
: second broadcast
P. G. Stephens broadcasts by permission of 'the Governors of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Aron
'What held this programme together was panache - panache in dialogue and music and in the way they were put over. Without that. there would have been every danger of the subject proving intractable, because it covers sixty years and more of military history... Alternatively the wanderings of the Irish brigade of Catholics loyal to the House of Stuart - the "Wild Geese" of the title -Ã alternatively, these could have been crystallised on dramatic characters. Mr. Francis Dillon, producing his own script, did neither. He seems to have aimed at a complex impression in sound of the morale of exiles committed to war: I think he got with it ' (Laurence Kitchin in The Critics)
