The scrappy Belfast Girls, including (from left) Ellen (Labhaoise Magee), Hannah (Mary Mallen), Judith (Caroline Strange), and Sarah (Sarah Street) on board the Inchinnan in a scene from Jaki McCarrick’s play at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
In the 1840s, famine devastated Ireland, and approximately 1 million people died during the period known as the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór in Irish). Another 2 million emigrated from the comparatively small island nation, and as a result, by 1852, the country had lost approximately 25 percent of its total population. Jaki McCarrick’s Belfast Girls, currently running at Irish Repertory Theatre, examines the effect the famine had on women in particular and explores its devastating impact on the poorest of the poor in Ireland.
Hannah and Ellen on deck.
The play is set in 1850 and centers around the Orphan Emigration Scheme, which was intended to alleviate the horrendous conditions caused by overpopulated workhouses and limited food supplies. Young women, 19 years old or younger, were sent off to Australia with the incentive that they might find comfortable living conditions, employment, and husbands (preferably British). Belfast Girls focuses on five of these women as they travel from Belfast to Sydney aboard the Inchinnan, one of the many ships that made the months-long voyage.
Biracial Judith (Caroline Strange), who is Caribbean-Irish, is the leader of the ragtag and feisty group that shares a mostly sunless and claustrophobic ship’s cabin. (Chika Shimizu’s excellent scenic design captures several different areas of the vessel, and Michael O’Connor’s dramatic lighting conveys the alternately placid and stormy days in the cross-hemispheric journey.) The other girls include Hannah (Mary Mallen), whose father sold her to a Belfast pimp; Ellen (Labhaoise Magee), a former prostitute and the most volatile of the shipmates; and Sarah (Sarah Street), the seemingly innocent country girl with a penchant for frilly bonnets.
A late addition to the cramped cabin is Molly (Aida Leventaki), a maid from Sligo, and she becomes a polarizing linchpin within the group. Molly provides a moral compass for the play, and as a self-identified modern woman, she shares her keen interest in Shakespeare, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels with the others. She helps them envision a new social order in which women will assume an integral part. She says, “The world is awake an’ on the move.”
“Sexual tensions and deep-seated animosities simmer just below the surface and keep the play engaging.”
The long and exposition-filled first act suggests that each woman is not who she claimed to be in her application for emigration. We know, for instance, that several of them are long past 19 years old, and most of them are criminals to one extent or another. The governmental authorities were most likely aware of this information but were glad to dispose of members of the underclass in any case. The girls all share, however, a desire to have a fresh start even as they harbor romantic and utopian ideas of Australia. As Judith explains, “We’re to be ready for the good things comin’ in the promised land. Because it’s not every wench can quit her misery, ya know? I seen plenty like ta roll aroun’ in it like hogs.”
The conditions on board the ship allow relationships to develop and hostilities to deepen. (Caroline Eng’s terrific sound design contributes to the feeling of general unease.) Under the assured direction of Nicola Murphy, sexual tensions and deep-seated animosities simmer just below the surface and keep the play engaging even during the longueurs of the play’s first half. Murphy and the other fine performers, unfortunately, are not able to make the second act’s series of revelations, political melodrama, extreme violence, and pat (although emotionally satisfying) ending altogether plausible.
Ellen looks on as Judith gives Hannah a stern warning. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
If the performers appear to be rather too pristine in their perfectly pressed ship outfits (China Lee designed the period costumes) and a little too well-coiffed (and did they all wear fresh lipstick at the start of the second act?), individually and as a group, they are believable as foul-mouthed guttersnipes. Each seems to have absorbed the cruelties her character has endured, but gradually they let loose their protective swagger and reveal the vulnerabilities and hurt underneath.
As the sisterhood’s ringleader, Strange is a commanding presence, and she is well-matched by Leventaki, who effectively combines fragility and intellectual passion in her performance as the out-of-place Molly. Mallen and Magee are convincing as a bickering pair, and Street is appropriately and wonderfully aloof.
Belfast Girls is at its best when it offers a rich character study of these five fascinating women. The play’s sea legs, though, become much wobblier when it veers into political diatribe and social militancy.
Belfast Girls runs through June 26 at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 W. 22nd St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and at 7 p.m. on Thursdays; matinees are at 3 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, call the box office at (212) 727-2737 or visit irishrep.org.
