English Theatre Düsseldorf are excited to be staging the German Premiere of BELFAST GIRLS by Jaki McCarrick, in March 2024.

The year is 1850, Belfast, Ireland. Two hundred women are departing on a ship bound for Australia under the Earl Grey Orphan Emigration Scheme. Escaping workhouses overpopulated during the Great Famine, they are set to become “mistresses of their own destiny” as servants, farm-workers – and, indeed, wives – in the Colonies. BELFAST GIRLS by Irish playwright, Jaki McCarrick, focuses on five of the most “notorious and riotous” of these women and their three month journey in the bowels of the Inchinnan ship. For some the voyage offers a fresh start, but others find they cannot escape the memory of the lives they've left behind.

The play has been staged numerous times internationally, but was last staged in Europe in Stockholm, in 2019. It has received rapturous reviews wherever it’s been performed and ETD are excited to introduce German audiences to Jaki McCarrick’s writing for the first time.