Birth of a nation illuminated through its impact on two towering figures of the Irish pantheon, and their enigmatic partnership. O'Casey clawing his way out of poverty in the slum tenements to fame and relative fortune on the strength of his great trilogy of plays. Markievicz heading in an opposite direction has turned her back on the vast family estates in County Sligo to embrace the cause of Dublin's poor. Comrades in the Gaelic League, Larkin and Connolly's Transport Union, the great 1913 lock-out, and the Citizen Army; they have a serious falling out over co-operation with the nationalist Irish Volunteers approaching the rising of 1916, from which O'Casey earns his spurs as a writer while Markievicz earns a death sentence