Bé Carna E-Book

Deirdre Kinahan

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 63

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Five women reflect on their lives as prostitutes on the streets of Dublin. Deirdre Kinahan's short play Bé Carna: Women of the Flesh is a dark tale inspired by true-life stories, reverberating with humanity, warmth and comic humour. It was first staged by Tall Tales theatre company at Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin, in 1999.

Leseprobe

DEIRDRE KINAHAN: SHORTS

Bé Carna

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

This book of plays is dedicated to the memory of my brilliant, brave and beautiful friend, Jo Egan.

‘She is a girl would not be afraid to walk the whole world with herself’ Lady Augusta Gregory

Contents

Introduction

Author's Note

Original Production

Characters

Bé Carna

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

IntroductionDeirdre Kinahan

I am delighted by the publication of these five short plays which feature intermittently in the swirl of my writing career from my very first effort, Bé Carna (1999), to my most recent commission, An Old Song, Half Forgotten (2023). They each carry their own story as to my life in theatre, as well as reaching out into the ether to find voice for some beautiful, broken characters disappeared by the world.

The first play, Bé Carna (women of the flesh), was written in 1999 when I was working as an actress in my own fledgling theatre company, Tall Tales. A good friend of my mother Pat, Sister Fiona Pryle, was setting up a support group for women working in prostitution in Dublin and asked me if I would teach the ladies basic literacy and computer skills as a means of subsidising my budding artistic life. I spent five years working with this brilliant organisation, Ruhama Women’s Project, now considered to be one of the most important advocacy groups in Ireland and Europe.

Back in the day, however, we hadn’t a bob, and I remember literally wallpapering a tiny room at the top of a shop in a tough part of Dublin, with two of the women, to create our first meeting place. The women accessing the project had spent most of their lives working in prostitution. They were older now and Ruhama was trying to help them retrain and secure a different means of making a living, if that was their desire. Prostitution in Dublin in the 1990s was still an outdoor/street pursuit, though a new group of trafficked and drug-using women were growing in number. Ruhama had an outreach service and provided a safe space with lovely services, such as reflexology, massage, counselling and various educational classes.

The ladies knew I was trying to make a career in theatre, so they used to come and see me in plays produced by me and my friend Maureen Collender through Tall Tales. Then one of the women asked if I would write a play about them; a play that gave a true picture of who they were as women, not just as prostitutes. I thought it a great idea and said I would try to put a team together, including a writer, explaining that I didn’t write for theatre. The women, however, were having none of it; they knew me, trusted me and wanted me to write that play. So… what to do but give it a go? And so Bé Carna – and Deirdre the playwright – were born.

The play is a series of five interlinking monologues inspired by stories I came across at Ruhama. I suppose I wanted to share with an audience the privilege of knowledge that I enjoyed as to how diverse and courageous this community of women are. How they don’t fit into any stereotype and how their lives as women are deeply impacted by society’s response to prostitution. I worked with a wonderful team of five actors, and director Gerry Morgan, in figuring out how to link and perform these individual pieces, imagining a kind of homage to the ghosts of Irish women subjected to institutionalisation and vilification over the centuries. We played for a few weeks in Dublin and took the play to Edinburgh. It was very well received, and I believe organisations used the text for advocacy and education around the realities of such a life for many years. It is, understandably, a dark tale, but reverberates nonetheless with humanity, warmth and comic humour – because that is/was the truth of the fantastic women I knew at the time.

Hue & Cry is a very dear play to me because I believe it to be the play where I really found my writing voice. Seven years in, it was written as part of a programme of new plays by women produced by Tall Tales for a lunchtime season of nine weeks. The play is an exploration of grief and how it might shape a human being. It was written not long after my own mother died and was probably part of my trying to figure out how to hold on to a happy disposition whilst facing the cruel void of her absence. I had also experienced a miscarriage that year so was ‘reeling’, to quote my old pal Damian who is central to the play.

The set-up is quite traditional: it is the night before a funeral and two cousins meet at the gathering. There is a dilemma, however,

in that the son of the man to be buried, Damian, is not welcome, and his cousin Kevin (a delicate dance choreographer) has been sent into the tiny sitting room to throw him out! The play, to me, was always like a boxing match, as these two gorgeous, broken beings shift and dance around each other before coming to a deep understanding despite themselves, and connecting in a way that one might never imagine.

Hue & Cry was originated by two great Irish actors, Will O’Connell and Karl Shiels. Karl in particular is a legendary figure, who died far too young in 2019. I was thrilled when Will took to directing a new version in the spring of that year at its original venue with two younger actors, never knowing that seeing Karl there was to be the last time I would ever encounter him.

Bogboy is my dad’s favourite play, a badge that brings its own importance to my heart. My poor dad never thought I’d make a living in theatre and he spent years trying in vain to redirect me. Indeed, to this day, I’m still not sure he is entirely convinced!

The play centres around two characters, Hughie and Brigid, and their budding friendship in the bogs of Meath. This pair couldn’t be less likely bedfellows, with totally different backgrounds, outlooks, accents, inner and outer lives – yet they bring great consolation to each other, as Brigid struggles with drug addiction and Hughie his mental health. They are thrown together when Brigid moves to a rural rehabilitation programme, begging lifts from her gentle, monosyllabic neighbour. As their doomed friendship grows, we get a sneak peak into their lives, but all is upended when an amnesty is announced for those involved in IRA terrorist murders during the troubled 1970s. Bogboy is really a play about Ireland’s relationship with the Northern Irish struggle, our deep complicity in and denial of that war, told through the meeting of these two lost and lonely souls. It was originally written for RTÉ as a radio play and then adapted for the stage, winning two awards at the 2010 First Irish Festival in New York.

Wild Notes is an unusual little play, written for Solas Nua Theatre Company in Washington DC, one of many plays written for or produced by international theatre companies as my career moved more and more beyond Ireland. The play was commissioned as a sister play to one written by Psalmayene 24, a hip-hop artist from Washington DC, in commemoration of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist, who visited Ireland in the 1840s. The two plays were performed as one production in a makeshift tent on the pier of the Anacostia River, where Douglass once lived.