The Shaughraun

Until recently only eight of Kalem’s Irish films were known to have survived. This changed when the IFI Archive received a single can of nitrate film which had been rescued from a house clearance in Lisburn, Co. Antrim. The reel carried the entire first act (over ten minutes) of The Shaughraun. The reel was scanned to 4k by R3Store studios in London and deposited at the IFI’s nitrate storage facility at the BFI. The digital restoration is now preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.   The project was made possible with funding from Screen Ireland.

Dublin-born Dion Boucicault was one of the most popular playwrights of his era, with his melodramas in constant revival on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1890s and beyond. Having established their reputation with Irish subjects, beginning with A Lad from Old Ireland (1910), Kalem turned to Irish literature, including three of Boucicault’s best-known Irish plays: The Colleen Bawn (1911), Arrah-na-Pogue (1911) and The Shaughraun (1912).

It was not the first film adaptation of The Shaughraun—Vitagraph had made a one-reel version in 1907, starring one of cinema’s first movie stars, Florence Lawrence—nor the last (My Wild Irish Rose, 1922), but Kalem’s sought to be the most authentic. In trade advertisements, the company stressed that it had “purchased the photoplay rights exclusively from the Boucicault estate” and had “produced every scene in picturesque Old Erin.”

The film begins with scenes featuring Sidney Olcott as Con, the Shaughraun, and the court sentencing Robert Ffolliott (George Melville) to a penal colony in Australia—events that in fact precede the action of the play. We then move to the opening scene of the stage drama, in which Claire Ffolliott (Gene Gauntier, Kalem’s resident star actress and screenwriter) is discovered churning milk by the English officer Captain Molineux (Jack J. Clark, her real-life fiancé), who subsequently falls hopelessly in love with her. It is a role Gauntier would surely have relished playing on the stages of the era; but thanks to the rediscovery of this reel, she has achieved something altogether more distinctive: immortality.

The surviving footage shows Kalem doing what it did best: combining crudely constructed outdoor sets with dramatic location shooting in the service of culturally ambitious stories, often with Gauntier at their centre. The Shaughraun was one of seven fiction films made by the company in Ireland in 1912, during a return to Kerry following its lengthy and highly productive overseas tour. That tour included Egypt and Palestine, where Kalem made more than thirty films, among them the pioneering life-of-Christ story From the Manger to the Cross as well as six other subjects shot in and around Killarney. The rediscovery of The Shaughraun, partial though it is, nonetheless represents a significant and welcome addition to the history of early Irish cinema and theatre.

Notes by Dr Tony Tracy, University of Galway

The Shaughraun is released here on UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, 27 October 2026.