INTERVIEW: ‘Belfast Girls’ is both historic and contemporary
Photo: Belfast Girls stars Caroline Strange and Sarah Street. Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
The new production of Jaki McCarrick’s Belfast Girls, playing through June 26 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City, focuses on a group of five young women who are sent from Belfast to Sydney to become “mistresses of their own destiny,” according to press notes. They are meant to escape the Famine back home, and find work and a new place to live in Australia. This was all part of the plans of Earl Grey, the British secretary of state for the colonies, who dubbed the program the Female Orphan Emigration Scheme. The teenagers didn’t know what was in store for them during the hellish ocean crossing and their new life on the other side of the globe.
The story is brought to life by director Nicola Murphy, along with cast members Aida Leventaki, Labhaoise Magee, Mary Mallen, Caroline Strange and Sarah Street.
“I actually found the play about a year ago,” Murphy said in a recent phone interview. “I work at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with college-level acting students, and I needed something for an all-female cast. So it was actually Sarah Street, who plays Sarah Jane Wylie in the current production, [who] had suggested this play to me, so I initially did it with my students. But it was still socially distancing and masked, and we didn’t quite get to do the play full out. But I thought it was such a great piece of work, and we did a reading at the Irish Rep for [founders] Ciarán [O’Reilly] and Charlotte [Moore] to let them hear it out loud. And thankfully they wanted to program it, so that’s the journey of the play over the past year.”
Murphy found the Irish history of the piece fascinating, and she didn’t know too much about the Female Orphan Emigration Scheme before reading McCarrick’s words. She knew a lot about the time of the Great Famine, but Early Grey and his scheme were new topics.
“I just thought that that was a story that really deserved to be told, and also the characters, I just think they’re five really complex, interesting, brave women,” she said. “So I really was drawn to wanting to tell their story. … We did a lot of research together, myself and the actors. Jaki had done extensive research herself before she wrote the play, so there was a lot of stuff that she was able to share with us. But I like to do research regardless of what play it is that I’m working on. And generally we decide the areas that we want to research, and then everyone will go away. People will pick a different topic, and then we usually come back and share that together as a group. So I find that that gives people a real ownership over the world of the play that we’re creating, so we definitely did a lot of research.”
Originally, the playwright wrote the piece as an allegory to the 2008 financial crisis in Ireland, another historical time of mass immigration. When that was occurring 14 years ago, she apparently started to look back in the history books at other times of unrest, Murphy noted.
“The women and their stories feel contemporary even though it’s set in 1850, and I think that that’s something that’s quite powerful about this piece,” the director said. “There are definitely parallels. I mean, we were working on this when everything was sort of happening about Roe v. Wade. It’s not necessarily that we sat down and had a conversation about that particularly, but we all are aware. You can feel it, and it sort of elevates the importance of telling the story.”
This “scheme” was set up, Murphy said, to relieve the workhouses because they had so many workers, and at the same time, the British were colonizing Australia.
“So there were more men, to put it simply, than women over there, so they needed to populate,” Murphy said. “They needed wives. They needed servants, millworkers. We talk about that in the play, so there was more of a sinister reason for wanting to send them there. I think for the girls themselves, we know they were trying to escape the Famine, so I think like any immigrant, they were just looking for a better life. I don’t know that they necessarily knew exactly what was ahead of them when they got there, but they were just trying to survive. I think it was a mixture. I think people felt that this was a way out for them without necessarily knowing what was on the other side.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Belfast Girls, directed by Nicola Murphy, continues through June 26 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
