Putting Northern Ireland's women writers front and centre

RTÉ News​

22-05-2025

Producer Alice Malseed introduces the Front and Centre Festival, a three-day symposium seeking new ways of creating space for women's playwriting in the theatre industry of Northern Ireland.
Later this month, a collective of women working in collaboration with the Drama Department at Queen's University Belfast will host the Front and Centre celebration of writing by women, non-binary and queer writers.
The celebration will bring together theatre enthusiasts, artists, academics, researchers and policy-makers for three enlivening days. The event aims to address critical concerns relating to gender inequality within the theatre sector.. The festival will draw on the issues unearthed by the #WakingTheFeminists campaign in 2015/16, and will look at progress (and its absence) since that seismic campaign. Maggie Cronin's The Headcount, published in 2021, highlighted the disparity in gender representation across the top funded theatres and companies in Northern Ireland. This research revealed that theatre companies receiving the most public funding produced the lowest number of plays by women, with some companies producing less than 15%.
Plays are written to be performed. The only way a playwright really learns is in communion with an audience. When we rob female playwrights of that opportunity, we're robbing them of their chance to learn and develop. When women artists do not get to develop their craft, an entire generation of Northern Irish voices and writers is lost. Further, audiences are denied the opportunity to see a diversity of voice and story on our local stages. Northern Irish women deserve to see authentic representations of themselves. They deserve to have their stories told by people with lived experience. These plays and their writers need support from venues and companies, and need platforms to have their voices heard. Front and Centre ask - why isn't this happening? And what can we do to change it?
Despite the lack of women's plays being produced in the North, there is immense talent in playwriting in the area. Front and Centre will showcase the talent and achievements of Northern Irish artists. We will host a number of rehearsed readings, screenings, performances and scratch-sharings by Northern Irish artists such as Caoimhe Farren, Aoibh Johnson, Amanda Verlaque, Caitlin Magnall-Kearns, Carley Magee, Clare Dwyer-Hogg, Anna Teresa McGrath and Alice Malseed. Many of these artists have won or been shortlisted for other national and international playwriting awards, including the Victoria Wood Prize, The Verity Bargate Award, and the Women's Prize for Playwriting. Karis Kelly, who conceived of the festival, won the Women's Prize for Playwriting in 2022 with her play Consumed.
Speakers and panellists at Front and Centre will include key figures from the #WakingTheFemninists campaign, such as Sarah Durcan and Ciara Murphy, they'll be joined by Olwen Dawe, Project Advisor to the Safe to Create programme and Brona Whittaker of Arts and Business NI, amongst others.
The weekend offers a chance for attendees to experience the diverse and vibrant women-led creative talent in Northern Ireland. Ultimately the aspiration with Front and Centre is to highlight the brilliance of these artists, while also debating and discussing new models of making theatre…this is an opportunity to look at what is and isn't working in the pursuit of gender equality and intersectionality in Northern Irish theatre. The idea is that participants will be energised by the discussions and feel engaged in the possibilities of what might come next.