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Belfast Girls: 2012 National Famine Commemoration Event



photo of The Belfast Girls

Belfast Girls

10 May 2012
at Droichead Arts Centre, Stockwell Street, Drogheda, Ireland

Jaki McCarrick’s latest play about five young women travelling to Australia in 1850 draws a chilling parallel between the Irish Famine and today’s continuing banking crisis. The story of the so-called ‘orphan girls’ on board, for whom the voyage provides a fresh start – as well as time to come to terms with the disaster they have left behind – is a savage attack on the policy (then and now) of ‘laissez-faire’.
Written by award-winning Irish playwright Jaki McCarrick and directed by fellow National Theatre Studio graduate and long-term collaborator, Svetlana Dimcovic,

Belfast Girls was staged in August 2011 as part of the Without Décor season of new plays at the King’s Head Theatre, London. It immediately attracted a lot of interest and was developed further at the National Theatre in London in January 2012. The King’s Head nominated the play for the prestigious 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for which it was shortlisted and declared a finalist in March 2012. This (Drogheda) staged reading of Belfast Girls is made up of cast members from the original King’s Head Production and is read here with permission from the National Theatre Studio.


Cast: Victoria Armstrong, Martha Barnett, Chereen Buckley, Angela Costello, Emma O'Grady

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  • Thu 10 May
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