A Morning for Those Awake: A Report on a Meeting that took place in Cork City
The Metropole Hotel, Friday November 20th 2015 10am

Today many of the women of Munster working in theatre met in the Beckett room of the Metrepole hotel- on Mc Curtain St. Cork. It was a room of women and one man. I arrived late, but we introduced ourselves and then discussed the purpose of the meeting. The idea we could pull our strengths together to develop theatre in the region, for ourselves, and the younger generation to follow was the central theme of the discussion. Actually, the importance of getting young people access to theatre was referenced regularly, as well as thinking about the language theatre uses, and how it ranges in register from people working in theatre and those in the “Ivory towers of academia”. A point well worth raising. Other discussion points were more practical, how will we organise ourselves, and what are we doing? At present we can say there are activities being discussed, and I’m sure the next meeting in December will say a lot more.

I can only imagine the pockets of women meeting up all over the country. I believe by the end of 1916 women will be dumping the golf clubs and the negations of men, and filling up the theatres and discussing the possibilities of the future. Peter Brook had the Poor Theatre - I want a Maternal Theatre. I want to help women through pain and hardship. I find this hard to do in my personal life and harder to do in writing, but I do believe it drives a lot of my thinking about what the theatre can be. I want to use the theatre to celebrate feminine identity, parody its complexity and laugh whole-heartedly at the silly things we fear. I also want to talk about child loss, and I mean child loss in the much bigger way, but for me I don’t think we have enough stories about how little we are taught at school and how crappy our sex education was growing up, so I’d like to make a play about this some day. The meeting got me thinking about what stories I want to tell, so that was massively positive. I don’t know, I just know that today a room of women decided on a few good points. They will be circulated and another meeting will be held, and hopefully whatever comes of it, will be fruitful and robust.

More anon.