Escaping the Irish famine in 1850 five young women seek passage on a ship to Australia. For many of the orphan girls on board, the voyage offers a fresh start. But some girls find they cannot easily escape the memory of their past lives …
Belfast Girls is a world premiere of the newest play from award winning Irish playwright Jaki McCarrick, directed by fellow National Theatre Studio graduate and long-term collaborator, Svetlana Dimcovic.
Cast includes Victoria Armstrong, Martha Barnett, Chereen Buckley, Angela Costello & Amy Molloy.
Belfast Girls is the second production in The Kings Head Theatres new writing season Without Décor. Theatre company Good Night Out Presents continues its mission to bring new work to London stages by producing Without Décor led by Artistic Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher & Associate Director Hamish MacDougal. Inspired by the Royal Court Sunday night performances in the 1960s, that provided a first platform for writers such as Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker, Without Décor provides a vital platform for new writers; allowing them to develop their work in a fully staged production with actors off book but no set.

This is where the writers theatre that everyone talks about is really happening
(Mark Ravenhill, The Independent)

Monday 1st, 8th, 15th August 10:00pm
Tickets: £7.50
The Kings Head Theatre, 115 Upper Street, London N1 1QN
Book online: http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/without-decor
Box office: 0207 478 0160

FREE to the PUBLIC, Audience feedback is encouraged! Come and be a part of the creative process.

LEOPOLDVILLE by Jaki McCarrick

Presented Monday at 7pm in the Calvary Center for Culture and Community

4740 Baltimore Avenue

Everywhere is Leopoldville. Everywhere.

Jaki McCarrick’s LEOPOLDVILLE shines a bright light on the destructive power of directionless young men.  Set in 1990 in an Irish border town, a gang of teenage boys with few prospects ends a long night of “adventure” by breaking into “The Congo”, a pub owned by a well-traveled widower.  When the owner comes back and claims to have no valuables, no African diamonds, nothing more than the cash in the till, the gang starts to fall apart, and things spiral out of control.

About the playwright:
Jaki McCarrick is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. Her first play, The Mushroom Pickers, won the 2005 Scottish Drama Association’s National Playwriting Competition and premiered at the Southwark Playhouse in London in May 2006 and in New York in February 2009. Her most recent play, Leopoldville, was this year selected by David Hare as a finalist in the 2010 Yale Drama Series Playwriting Competition – and won the 2010 Papatango New Writing Award. The play was recently staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London to much critical acclaim.

REVIEWS FOR LEOPOLDVILLE

A superbly dark, taut thriller
A fascinating piece of theatre. RemoteGoat

Impossible to shake off, the effects of this show plaster themselves on its audience…a stellar script…Expect to leave shaken. Spoonfed Theatre Journal

A sharp, well observed piece of writing that is performed beautifully by this young, ensemble cast. The tension builds and builds throughout the play culminating in a harrowing twist that both excites and disgusts in equal measure…Fantastic work. Broadway Baby

A fantastic, haunting, terrifying play …….very strong, young cast & tight direction. It’s the winning entry for The Papatango New Writing Competition 2010 and rightly so…The Group, Theatre Royal Stratford East

Jaki McCarrick was declared as the first ever winner of the Liverpool Lennon Paper Poetry competition by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

The glittering ceremony was held on Saturday the 6th of November in the Sir Paul McCartney Auditorium at Lipa (Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.)

May I personally thank everybody who supported the event and encouraged such an amazing rersponse.

I enclose a copy of Jaki McCarick’s deservedly winning poem

Roger Cliffe-Thompson

Competition organizer

eventpoets.co.uk

“In my poem ‘The Selkie of Dorinish,’ I imagine John and Yoko living on the island of Dorinish in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo. Lennon purchased this island in the ’60s. I imagine an unusual arrangement for the couple in which John is a shape-changing seal. I rarely enter poetry competitions but I got a strong feeling for this poem after coming across an article on Mayo by Tamasin Day-Lewis in Cara, the Aer Lingus magazine. Like a lot of writers, I am often at my most creative when travelling about.” Jaki McCarrick

The Selkie of Dorinish

She has come to love meadowsweet,

and rubs its Germolene smell

into her sallow skin.

In the evenings she gathers wingnuts

for her new artwork

and makes eyes and beady lines

from black bluebell seeds.

Around the cottage are the trees

I planted as seedlings in ‘67:

Spanish oak, a row of limes and elder,

and everywhere the stark green water –

on which, at night,

the mainland throws

its gold and amber elvers.

Sometimes ships will stop for stones

for ballast on the western beach.

Once a sailor saw me

changing from my wet-suit;

then Yoko came and we three sat together

drinking, then watching

the grey Atlantic skies

burst open with light.

There is an island for every day

of the year in Clew.

And here we should have come

after she’d had her New York premonition.

But better late than never.

She keeps the house now

and I the sea around it.

In winter she collects her kindling

in the morning,

wearing lambswool boots

that make no sound.

If out, I’ll cast an eye across and at Croagh Patrick

then watch the mist fall over Inishcuttle,

thick as sealskin on the reeling sea.

Jaki McCarrick 2010

http://jakiscloudnine.blogspot.com/