CloudNine

This abstract on my play Belfast Girls comes from Dr. Jason King of NUIG. He recently presented a paper on the play at a symposium on Famine and Irish Theatre and Fiction. " In her play  Belfast Girls  Jaki McCarrick creates striking parallels between Ireland's current economic crisis and its most devastating catastrophe.  It features a cast of young female workhouse "orphans"   who embody current anxieties about the displacement of Irish families and the diminishing prospects for Irish youth, in particular, against the historical backdrop of the Irish famine migration.  The  play is set mainly below deck and recreates the journey of the emigrant vessel ‘Inchinnan” which sailed from Belfast to Sydney in 1850.  From the beginning, the cast of five young women in  Belfast Girls  exchange profanities in a seemingly anachronistic modern dialect and engage in sexually boisterous antics that are gradually revealed to prov...

          At the beginning of 2010, my play Leopoldville won the Papatango New Writing Prize. Based on a true story, the play is set in an Irish border town and explores a crime committed at the tail end of the recession of the 1980s. It took a year to write and by the end of that year, 2008, Lehman’s Bank had collapsed as had Anglo Irish Bank, plunging Ireland into another recession, from which, seven years later, it has still not recovered. The cast of this play is all male (five young men, one older male) –and in 2009 I began to think about writing something that would be the converse of this work: an all female play - a thought that grew especially during the London-based rehearsal and performance period of Leopoldville, when I considered that I needed a serious break from the testosterone-heavy environment I’d been in for months (the youths of my play are tough and violent and I’d already spent a year with them in my imagination!). I did no...