Some stories never really leave this place. Bold Girls is one of them.
This June, Centre Stage brings Rona Munro’s Bold Girls back to a Belfast stage for the first time in 36 years. Running from 9 to 13 June in the Naughton Studio at the Lyric Theatre, the revival marks a significant return for a play that still shapes how the Troubles are remembered and who gets to tell those stories.
Directed by Michael Quinn and marking 40 years of Centre Stage, this is the first time the play has been produced by a Northern Irish company, giving renewed immediacy to its focus on women’s lives during the conflict.
Set in west Belfast in the early 1990s, it follows Marie (Caroline Curran), Cassie (Hannah Carnegie) and Nora (Mairead McKinley) as they hold together everyday life while violence unfolds just beyond their front door. The men in their lives are absent, mythologised, resented or mourned. What remains is the work of carrying on.
When a young stranger, Deirdre (Annie McIlwaine), arrives, that balance begins to shift. Assumptions unravel. The stories these women tell about love, loyalty and survival begin to fracture.
First staged in 1991, Bold Girls pushed against male dominated narratives of the Troubles by placing working class women at its centre. The violence rarely appears on stage, but its presence is constant, shaping the atmosphere of the home and the relationships within it.
What emerges is a portrait of endurance and its cost.
The production runs at the Lyric Theatre from 9 to 13 June and is suitable for audiences aged 15 and over.
