Holding Fire! is a play by the English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 and actor Jack Shepherd. Making its debut at the Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, an Elizabethan playhouse in the London Borough of Southwark, located on the south bank of the River Thames, but destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt 1614 then demolished in 1644. The modern reconstruction is an academic best guess, based...

 theatre in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in July 2007, the play tracks the rise and fall of the Chartist movement in Britain during the first half of the 19th century. It is written in epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 form and contains more than 50 speaking characters, including several historical figures such as William Lovett

William Lovett

William Lovett was a British activist who was a leader of the political movement Chartism as well as one of the leading London-based Artisan Radicals of his generation....

, Feargus O'Connor

Feargus O'Connor

Feargus Edward O'Connor was an Irish Chartist leader and advocate of the Land Plan.- Background :Feargus O'Connor was born into a prominent Irish Protestant family, the son of Irish Nationalist politician Roger O'Connor...

, Lord John Russell and General Charles Napier

Charles James Napier

General Sir Charles James Napier, GCB , was a general of the British Empire and the British Army's Commander-in-Chief in India, notable for conquering the Sindh Province in what is now Pakistan.- His genealogy :...

. The political drama is interwoven with the story of Lizzie and Will, two servants on the run from the police. The play was commissioned by the Globe as part of the Renaissance + Revolution series that constituted the 2007 season at the theatre.