The year is 1850.
In the midst of the infamous famine in Ireland – five young women from Belfast leave behind a bleak and soul-crushing environment of poverty and workhouses to sail to Australia, and the prospect of a new life.
That's the premise of the play Belfast Girls, by award-winning Irish-born playwright Jaki McCarrick, which will have its Canadian premiere in White Rock, March 1-11 at Coast Capital Playhouse, 1532 Johnston Rd.
Directed for Peninsula Productions by artistic director Wendy Bollard, the play's White Rock run will be followed by March 15 to 18 performances at the Culture Lab at the Vancouver Cultch.
Securing a first Canadian production of the play is an undoubted feather-in-the-cap for Peninsula – and for Bollard herself, who fell in love with the script last year during her eight months in London studying for a master's degree in directing through the University of Essex.
"I love this play – I could read it so many times," she enthused over coffee recently. "I also did my master's thesis on it, so I know it very well."
Also exciting is that the venture has the blessing and support of McCarrick herself – who is hoping to visit White Rock for the premiere.
It's an opportunity to champion a work that, aside from a first production at the King's Head Theatre in London in 2011(which resulted in it being shortlisted for several awards), further development by the National Studio and a production by Chicago theatre group Artemisia in 2015, has yet to be seen by a wider audience.
Most of all, it's a chance to push the theatrical envelope locally, something always dear to Bollard's heart, and evident in her balancing of Peninsula crowd pleasers like The Game's Afoot, Blithe Spirit and The 39 Steps with challenging fare such as Death and the Maiden, Agnes of God and a number of the darker plays featured in the ongoing staged-reading series at Centennial Park.
No one should imagine Belfast Girls – which will be presented with a warning of extremely coarse language and unsuitability for children – as some breathless, rosy-hued, Hallmark version of the past, Bollard said.
McCarrick has taken a great deal of historical research and fashioned from it a gritty, visceral drama of a group of diverse women cooped up in the creaky confines of a sailing ship – with enough mysteries and emotional baggage aboard to keep a socio-political-women's issues forum humming for a week.
There's an inescapable irony in the fact that Earl Gray – now known mainly for the tea variety that bears his name – came up with the scheme to ship orphan girls 'of good character' to Australia as workers.
There's further irony in the fact that the scheme – which ended up shipping some 4,000 young Irish women to Australia between 1848 and 1850 – was largely subverted by a bureaucratic push to purge Belfast's workhouses of women who were stigmatized as prostitutes.
And, as McCarrick shows, the scheme was further subverted by many of the women themselves, who, in a desperate desire to escape the life that poverty had forced on them, were willing to bribe local officials and priests with sexual favours to secure letters attesting to their 'good character'.
Belfast Girls presents a cross-section of the women caught up in these events – and, given the history, it's little wonder that not all are exactly what they purport to be.
The characters are tough-as-nails Ellen (Paige Gibbs); Hannah (Tegan Verheul), who loves to sing; Sarah (Amelia Ross), a country girl whose brother is already in Australia, Judith (Mariam Barry), daughter of a Jamaican woman and an Irish man; and the former servant girl Molly (Olivia Sara Grace), who turns out to be unexpectedly literate.
"We had a lot of young women come out to audition for it – I wanted it to be a group of women who complemented each other, and I think we've managed that," Bollard said.
"The cast is young, fresh and relatively inexperienced, and I think this is going to be a huge experience for them. I'm also thrilled that we have women as stage manager, as costume designer, lighting designer and sound designer."
The set – designed by Bollard's husband, Andy Sorensen – is meant to suggest a ship, rather than depict one literally, she said.
There are practical reasons for this, including the fact that the production will have to packed up and moved to the Cultch after the White Rock run.
But also, Bollard said, "I want to treat the audience as adults who understand theatre – you don't have to show them everything."
The most important part is finding the truth of the action and setting in the work of the actors, she said.
"As I'll say to them, if you see it, I'll see it."
McCarrick has been generous in offering help, support and advice, Bollard said, adding that she has, herself, done extensive research into the period of the play and the plight of women at the time.
"I certainly hope Jaki makes it out here for the opening," Bollard said. "It's a great privilege to be able to direct her play. She's a fantastic person and a great writer.
"I've shied away from asking her a bunch of questions. I kind of feel the artist has put it out there and it's our job now to interpret it.
"I'll be interested to see how the audience reacts to it. It's definitely funny in a number of places, but it's definitely hard-core, too."
One of the characters brings a copy of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto on the journey, Bollard noted.
"The class divide of the time is a huge part of the message. It's not religion separating people, it's not the English against the Irish, it's about the 'one per cent' of the day against everybody else.
"It's sad to see how little is different between then and now, but, as one of the characters says, 'if this hasn't changed for us, maybe it will have changed for our daughters.'"
For more information and to reserve tickets, visit peninsulaproductions.org