Gangster series about Irish rebels in prohibition-era Chicago is in the works

Based on a play by Irish actors John Morton and Peter McGann, the producers have compared the show to Peaky Blinders.

The show is an adaptation of the hit play by John Morton (Dead Still) and Peter McGann (Small Town Big Story) that premiered in 2019.

The plot synopsis for the play reads:

"After a failed assassination attempt on Eamon de Valera, a rogue Cumann na mBán unit flees across the Atlantic to escape the law.

"With Prohibition in full swing, they earn their keep by making bootleg poitín and selling it on to the Chicago mob.

"But it’s not long before a gang war breaks out with them caught in the middle, and the lethal skills they honed back home hunting Black and Tans are taken to the bullet-strewn streets of the Windy City."

According to Variety, the series adaptation will be written by McGann (who recently went viral for a JOE video) and Morton.

The pair have described the show as “a classic rise-and-fall gangster story of immigrants staking their claim in the land of hope and glory".

Producer Paul Donovan of Deadpan Pictures has also compared the project to Peaky Blinders (which is set to return soon as well).

Speaking to Variety about adapting the play for the screen, Donovan explained: “[In the play] so much of the action necessarily happened off-stage.

"It was explosions and shootouts and all sorts of great action sequences that they gave the impression of happening, but you didn’t actually see them.”

Donovan told the US entertainment outlet that after seeing a "packed-out" production of The Roaring Banshees that had "the audience laughing and crying and hooting", he met with Morton and McGann to make a pitch about a possible adaptation, insisting that those action scenes would look great onscreen.

“Let’s go make a big, brave, ambitious piece of fun, cinematic TV," he told the writers, according to Variety.

The Roaring Banshees is set to be directed by the acclaimed Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman (Sea Fever, the recent Netflix hit Untamed) and consist of eight episodes.

The plan is also for the series to be shot in Ireland and Ontario, Canada, with the latter standing in for 1920s Chicago.

Producers on the show, Deadpan Pictures and Shaftesbury Films, are heading to Rome’s MIA Market - an entertainment industry event that runs from 6 - 10 October - to seek additional financing for the project.

On this, Donovan told Variety: “Between the two of us, we can bring up to 45% of the finance to the table... For MIA, our challenge now is to get partners on board for the rest of the funding.”

The news about The Roaring Banshees adaptation comes as The Westies, another new series about an Irish gang in America, is filming.

That Westies will star Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons.