Play based on the life of Guildford Four man Paddy Armstrong opens at the Lyric this week

WRONGLY convicted of the IRA bombings of Guildford and Woolwich in 1974, Paddy Armstrong would spend 15 years in English prisons along with Paul Hill, Gerard Conlon and Carole Richardson, until their convictions were overturned in 1989. Based on his best-selling memoir, Life After Life: A Guildford Four Memoir, this Thursday The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong returns to the Lyric Theatre stage where it will run until Sunday. Paddy co-wrote the memoir with Mary-Elaine Tynan, who subsequently co-wrote the stage adaptation with actor Don Wycherley and Niamh Gleeson. Don plays West Belfast man Paddy Armstrong in this powerful one-man show which is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. Mary-Elaine Tynan grew up in Dublin, but her mum and siblings are all from West Belfast. Her music teacher at school would later go on to marry Paddy Armstrong and it would be this connection that would lead to Mary-Elaine co-writing the Guildford Four man's memoir. In 2014 after Gerry Conlon died and when Mary-Elaine was working as a journalist with the Sunday Independent, she was approached by Paddy's wife Caroline and asked if she would interview Paddy as there was renewed media interest around the Guildford Four case with Gerry's passing. "Paddy isn't like Gerry and Paul," says Mary-Elaine. "He's very shy. When Paddy got out of prison he couldn't cope. He was too afraid to go back to Belfast because he was afraid that someone was going to put a bullet in him because he thought that people still thought that he was guilty because the British judicial system started a whispering campaign that they got out on a technicality. "Paddy was really media-shy, so when Gerry Conlon died his wife said to me the media are starting to ask for interviews and she said would you interview him and I said of course – and it was the first interview he did in about 20 years." Based on that interview Mary-Elaine made a documentary for RTÉ radio around the time of the 25th anniversary of the Guildford Four's release from prison. "To make the doc we went back to England and went back to Guildford where he had never been until he was arrested. We went back to London where he had been squatting, we went back to the Old Bailey, and we formed a really strong relationship and on that basis he asked me to write his memoir and I said, 'No way, I cannot take the responsibility, it's too important a story and I don't feel qualified to do it.'" Eventually Mary-Elaine agreed and over the next year worked on the memoir with Paddy. She said it was a hard process. "Paddy is so shy and only tells the funny stories," she said. "He only likes to talk about making prison hooch, having the craic and all the mad stuff; he doesn't want to talk about the dark stuff, like being put in solitary. "So it ended up I'd have to interview people who he was in prison with like this guy called Ronnie McCartney who was an IRA man from Belfast who was in prison at the same time as Paddy and was very good to Paddy. The IRA lads were very good to Paddy because they knew he wasn't one of them and they also saw how soft and gentle he was. Paddy nearly got himself into a lot of trouble in prison because he was a target, you know. He was so shocked when he was in prison, he hadn't a clue how to cope, so they looked after him and Ronnie in particular looked after him. So I interviewed people like Ronnie for the book, and others." Published in 2017, the highly acclaimed memoir reached number two in the Irish non-fiction charts and provided the foundation for the stage production. When Mary-Elaine was approached to write the stage production she approached a friend who works for RTÉ to help her with the first draft. "After that I looked for an actor and I had only one guy in mind and it was Don Wycherley because I saw him on the stage in The Abbey. "He and I worked on the play and rewrote it together over a year and we ended up with the stage play two years ago that became the play that has now been touring for the last two years. Everything in the play, even though they're dramatised, they're Paddy's words. "If people are afraid that it's going to be grim and dark, it is that, but it is also really funny, because Paddy is hilarious. He's got that black Belfast sense of humour. 2 Mary-Elaine Tynan "Don plays all the various people through the eyes of Paddy. I think it works really well as a one-man show. "I felt such a responsibility to tell Paddy's story, to do it justice after such an injustice was done to him. I also wanted people to remember him and know him in a way that most people don't. They felt like they knew Gerry (Conlon) through In The Name of The Father and through various other things that Gerry did over the years. They didn't know Paddy and I wanted them to know Paddy, the man who had this awful injustice but is so much more than this. He is hilarious and forgiving and kind and he's loving." The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong played at the smaller Naughton Studio at the Lyric last year. Now it is back on the main stage from Thursday to Sunday with a matinee on Saturday. The play has played throughout Ireland and in Britain and is heading to the US next year. Mary-Elaine says there are different reactions to the play, dependent on where it is being staged. "Dublin audiences, unless they're from the North, it's a story to them and they invest in it as a piece of theatre and they love it," she said. "Northern audiences, they go quiet. The first show in the Lyric last year it was really disarming because Don – who is on the stage – he's taking his energy from the audience, and he's going 'They've gone deathly silent, they don't like it' but they're listening intently and they're feeling it and they're remembering. But then they laugh in the right places and they gasp in the right places, and they jumped up at the end and gave an amazing response. "But in England it's a different experience again because there are often people who went through what it was like to be Irish in England in the seventies. And they're kind of retraumatised. One woman told us that she was in London when it all happened and she was walking by a park and she got pulled into the park and got raped. She had red hair and freckles and looked very Irish and the Irish were persona non grata at the time, so she couldn't go to the police because she felt that she wouldn't be believed and she said that was what it was like to be Irish in London in the seventies and eighties. "You couldn't be safe being Irish so she never reported that crime. She said I know this play is about Paddy but it is also about what it was like to be Irish at a certain period in history. And she said the play had given her comfort. "To me it has been the greatest honour of my career to tell this story because it means different things to different people and it's a true privilege and I ask people to come and see it." You can book tickets for The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong at www.lyrictheatre.co.uk The matinee on Saturday will be followed by a Q&A with Paddy Armstrong. The play will also be returning next year including at The Playhouse, Derry, in February and Burnavon Cookstown in March after selling out both venues last year. Read more on www.lifeandtimesofpaddy.com