Belfast Girls in Canada

The incredible cast of #belfastgirlscanada, directed by Wendy Bollard

In March 2017 Belfast Girls opens in Vancouver in Canada. This is the second international production of the play, which premiered in the USA last year to magnificent reviews. Belfast Girls, which is partly about the female experience of the Irish Famine and part allegory of the recent Irish banking crisis, was the Windy City Times Critics’ Pick in June 2015. Ruth Smerling of Theatreworld Magazine called it a “work of tremendous imagination”. Professor Regina Buccola, who writes the introduction to the published text of the play, refers to it as “a feminist materialist play in the tradition of Caryl Churchill’s Fen”.

Belfast Girls was developed in 2012 at the National Theatre Studio when I was on attachment to the theatre and was then shortlisted for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award and won the Galway Theatre Festival Playwriting Prize. I am currently also adapting Belfast Girls for the screen, having been selected this year for the Irish Film Board’s Talent Development Initiative. Directed by Wendy Bollard for Peninsula Productions, Belfast Girls opens on March 1^st 2017 at the Coast Capital Playhouse, White Rock, in British Columbia, Canada, and transfers from March 15 to the BMO Theatre Centre in Vancouver.

LINKS

BELFAST GIRLS TEXT https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28016219-belfast-girls

REVIEWS FOR BELFAST GIRLS

https://www.facebook.com/CultureIreland/posts/10153308548040803

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/THEATER-REVIEW-Belfast-Girls/51611.html

Comments

An excellent year for BELFAST GIRLS

In 2019 there were two magnificent productions of BELFAST GIRLS - and a reading of the play in Washington DC. BELFAST GIRLS premiered in August in Australia, at the Q Theatre in Queanbeyan, New SouthWales. Produced by Echo Theatre and directed by Jordan Best, this production did fantastically well and received a number of glowing reviews. I was so sorry to miss it and really hope that Jordan and the cast get to do it again. Here are some shots from this beautiful show: The next production was by the Swedish company, Batalj Scenkonst and this took place in Stockholm in November. This production marks the first production of the play in translation and luckily I was able to attend the opening night. Malin Erikson directed an absolutely stunning cast and I thought this was an incredibly beautiful show. Very physical and visual, with brilliant use of lighting and music. Even though I don't speak or understand Swedish I was completely moved by this show and really ho...

The Genesis of Belfast Girls

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...

International Reviews of BELFAST GIRLS

Reviews of BELFAST GIRLS by Jaki McCarrick Samuel French: https://www.samuelfrench.co.uk/p/58614/belfast-girls Agency News: h ttp://www.knighthallagency.com/jaki-mccarricks-award-winning-play-belfast-girls-will-be-in-kansas-city-missouri-from-7-29-april/ BELFAST GIRL PORTLAND OREGON, 2017 Dennis Sparks Sparks Reviews by Dennis Sparks 11/20/17 https://dennissparksreviews.blogspot.com/2017/11/belfast-girlscorrib-theatrese-portland.html “McCarrick has written a powerful play of the endurance of the human spirit.” “Whelan has beautifully balanced the wide stage…” “…the whole cast is first-rate, one of the best ensembles I’ve seen!” BroadwayWorld.com by Krista Garver 11/21/17 https://www.broadwayworld.com/portland/article/BWW-Review-Corrib-Theatres-BELFAST-GIRLS-is-Full-of-Fascinating-History-Could-Use-More-Emotion-201711 21 “It's a fascinating history - one I hadn't heard before - and McCarrick'...

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