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E-mailIrish female playwright gets well-deserved time in the spotlight with ‘Cell’
Paula Meehan's play to be performed at the first Irish Theatre Festival
There are a lot of things that get discreetly hidden away in Ireland. Take poverty statistics, for example.
Did you know that Ireland has the highest percentage of people living in relative poverty in the entire European Union – or that the stark gap between rich and poor there is the most pronounced of any nation in Western Europe?
You won’t find that information in the tourist brochures. It just doesn’t square with our sense of ourselves, but those are the facts.
Another thing that gets inexplicably hidden away in Ireland are the challenging works of the country’s women playwrights and writers (the “Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,” released in the early 1990s, originally omitted women from the entire literary canon without noticing).
Far too often in Ireland it’s the boys who hog the limelight (often literally) and all the glory that goes with it. Irish women writers usually have to wait (and wait) for their turn.
Take Paula Meehan, for example. Although renowned in Ireland, next week will see her first full scale production in New York in years.
Meehan’s play “Cell,” which will be staged as part of the first Irish Theatre Festival from September 8-20, tells the extraordinary story of four working class Dublin women, all mothers, whose lives and destinies are shaped by the deprivation of their own communities.
Meehan’s on home turf with this material. The award-winning playwright hails from inner city Dublin and she knows its hopes and fears intimately.
Presented by Ireland’s Fallen Angel Theatre Company, artistic director Aedin Moloney (daughter of the Chieftains leader Paddy Moloney) tells the Irish Voice and IrishCentral.com that the company was set up expressly to present the new plays written by female British and Irish playwrights in New York.
“The wealth of new female writing in England and Ireland has largely been untapped in New York,” says Moloney. “Fallen Angel Theatre is the first American company to present the work of Irish women writers that have never been performed in the United States.”
On her first read of the script of “Cell” Moloney was deeply impressed. It was dark material but it was also hilarious, a very Irish combination.
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