Travellers are rarely portrayed on the Irish stage. Rarer still are plays written by members of the travelling community. This is what makes Rosaleen McDonagh so special.
Her play, The Baby Doll Project, was performed at the Project Arts Centre in 2003. The production gained McDonagh a Metro Eireann Media and Multicultural Award for its depiction of travellers in modern Ireland.
Similar acclaim will no doubt come her way following the reworked reading of her play, John and Josie, which will take place at The Project, Dublin on Sunday December 4th as part of Traveller Focus week.
The piece tells the story of John and Josie, a traveller brother and sister whose relationship changes radically when their mother dies.
To make things worse John is secretly gay while Josie is a separated woman, bringing up two children on her own.
Ultimately, McDonagh is exploring traveller identity in modern Ireland and, specifically, gay identity among travellers. It is also the story of McDonagh’s own journey.
“There is that extra layer of my own experience as well as my support and loyalty to travellers who have other stuff to deal with,” she says. “Such as, say, a woman who wants to define her role in life as something more than being a wife or a mother – like Josie in this play – or what my gay friends had to go through.”
McDonagh hopes her play will spark debate among travellers about social issues. “In the traveller community, the roles of men and women are so narrowly defined. A lot of us just wouldn’t have had the opportunity to explore who we are other than being a traveller.”
For men, the pressure to confirm can, she says, be overwhelming. “Men really do have to play a sharply defined masculine role.”
She does not set out to condemn them for this: “They are not all violent or drunks or whatever. There are gentle, sensitive traveller men just like there are in the broader community.”
To what extent is the play about redefining the role of the woman in the traveller community?
“One of the roles is a single woman who has left her husband and she does want to be more than a wife and more than a mother,” she says. “She is on a journey and part of her journey is about being intimate with another person and that has its difficulties too. The John and Josie of the title are brother and sister, but they are both on a journey, like we all are, right?”