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 provide a means of self-protection from deeply damaging formative experiences in their youth. Their nominal leader is Judith, a Jamaican immigrant and prostitute who proclaims that “at least half of us have lied [to get] on this ship. The Belfast Girls? Half of us are public women. All known to each other”. Over the course of the voyage, their collective experiences of abandonment and abuse, infanticide, and recourse to prostitution are recounted, but a series of role reversals is also enacted on stage in which the most vulnerable member of the group is revealed to be the landlord’s daughter seeking to make her own escape from Ireland. The strategic duplicity of each of the “Belfast Girls” in feigning the role of Famine orphans as a means to emigrate enlists the audience’s sympathy for migrants past and present who arrive in a new country under false pretenses. Yet as their voyage continues, their opportunism in seeking a fresh start is also revealed to be self-defeating when they discover that even in Australia they will be subject to opprobrium, that their reputation as stigmatized “public women” has already preceded them to the New World. “We didn’t leave Ireland at all, ladies. Ireland has spat us out,” Judith bitterly acknowledges. By the same token, their personae as Famine orphans provides a renewed sense of comprehension of the futility of mass-migration to escape from national catastrophe. “If we weren’t all orphans before we left,” Judith declares, “we certainly are now!” It is the play’s refusal of consolation to mark the end of their voyage that resonates most profoundly for would-be emigrants now."
" 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 provide a means of self-protection from deeply damaging formative experiences in their youth. Their nominal leader is Judith, a Jamaican immigrant and prostitute who proclaims that “at least half of us have lied [to get] on this ship. The Belfast Girls? Half of us are public women. All known to each other”. Over the course of the voyage, their collective experiences of abandonment and abuse, infanticide, and recourse to prostitution are recounted, but a series of role reversals is also enacted on stage in which the most vulnerable member of the group is revealed to be the landlord’s daughter seeking to make her own escape from Ireland. The strategic duplicity of each of the “Belfast Girls” in feigning the role of Famine orphans as a means to emigrate enlists the audience’s sympathy for migrants past and present who arrive in a new country under false pretenses. Yet as their voyage continues, their opportunism in seeking a fresh start is also revealed to be self-defeating when they discover that even in Australia they will be subject to opprobrium, that their reputation as stigmatized “public women” has already preceded them to the New World. “We didn’t leave Ireland at all, ladies. Ireland has spat us out,” Judith bitterly acknowledges. By the same token, their personae as Famine orphans provides a renewed sense of comprehension of the futility of mass-migration to escape from national catastrophe. “If we weren’t all orphans before we left,” Judith declares, “we certainly are now!” It is the play’s refusal of consolation to mark the end of their voyage that resonates most profoundly for would-be emigrants now."
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