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Gerri Moriarty
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Theatre and Performance
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'Plowterin' is Scots/Irish for 'just wandering along slowly and
mindfullly'
The 'Talking Stanes' on the Falkland Estate, Fife, Scotland.
Some recent work
Uncovering
Belfast’s History 2008
The Prisoners’ Exercise Circle
in the former Crumlin Road Gaol provided a gloomy and evocative setting for two recent performances of ‘My Dear Mary’,
a dramatised account of the 1907 Belfast Dock Strike. Several of the key events of the strike took place in the streets surrounding
the Gaol, and the audience sees them through the eyes of two women trade union activists of the time, Mary McCarthy and Mary
Galway.
The letters they write each other are fictional but the turbulent history they describe
is not. Jim Larkin’s call to the women at Gallagher’s cigarette factory to join a union and fight for better wages
and conditions, the brief unity agreed between Protestant and Catholic workers, the reading of the Riot Act and subsequent
bayonet charge on the Falls Road build up a vivid picture of a city under siege.
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| Crumlin Rd. DSDNI (Department of Social Development, Northern Ireland) |
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| Crumlin Rd, DSDNI (Department of Social Developmen |
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| Performing 'the Bench'. Photo Gerri Moriarty |
Old Age and Youth: Breaking the Stereotypes
‘ The Bench’, the play Gerri wrote with older people over
the age of 70, is now being performed in a completely different context. Gerri is working with Northern Ireland’s Opportunity
Youth and the cast of her play ‘The Bench’, to deliver an intergenerational project for young people, encouraging
them to explore stereotyped views of old age.
‘The initial reaction of the young people to the characters in the play is that they are ‘a bit boring
‘, ‘quaint’, ‘pensioners who can’t be annoyed’. After having seen the play, however, the
young people describe their elders differently. ‘Good fun, interesting
stories’, ‘ can’t keep still for a minute’, ‘ approachable’.
The
young people will work with Gerri and some members of the cast of the Bench to make a short film as part of the project.
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