DRAMA

This multidisciplinary play, using words, cinematics, animation, music and VFX, allows audiences to experience the history of the trial while imagining the lives of the accused. This one-act play about the Islandmagee trial, Witches in Eden, was written by Belfast playwright Olga Fielden in 1948. The gender politics of Fielden’s play, its approach to historical accuracy, and the positioning of the witches as victims prefigure Arthur Millar’s The Crucible (1953). This is a story of murder, magic, the devil, and a community in crisis. It offers a unique glimpse into how the ‘witch hunts’ that claimed over 40,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores. Premiered on Halloween, 2023: Riverside Theatre, Coleraine.

Directed by David McIntyre

The play is performed and produced by students, staff and alumni from Ulster’s School of Arts and Humanities, including the Cinematic Arts, Drama, Creative Audio, Creative Musicianship and History programmes.

KEY COLLABORATORS

Lisa Fitzpatrick studied in Trinity College and University College Dublin prior to completing her PhD at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. She is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, teaching critical theory, dramaturgy, and Irish Theatre, and supervising PhD students in contemporary Irish theatre and post-conflict performance research. Lisa has published extensively on performance and violence, post-conflict theatre, and gender. She has received funding from the British Academy and the Canadian High Commission, and has been an invited speaker at a number of events, including the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), the Warwick Politics and Performance Network, and the Irish Theatrical Diaspora project.

Kat Woods is a writer and director from Co. Fermanagh Northern Ireland. She has a particular interest in staging works that provide a platform for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Works that are representative of her community and that redefine the discourse surrounding the poverty stereotype. She was selected for the first Royal Court/Kudos TV writers Group and is a BBC Belfast voices and BBC Drama room London alumnus. Her work has been performed upon invite across the UK, Ireland, Finland, China and the USA. Awards include The Peggy Ramsey Award, The Royal Literary Fund, The Stage Award for Excellence and The Fringe Review Award for Outstanding Theatre. Kat is currently under commission for a full length play with The Abbey Theatre Dublin and Kabosh Theatre Belfast. She has a pilot commission with BAFTA winning Out of Orbit productions for a 6-part comedy series and is currently in a writer’s room with Element Pictures. Kat is represented by London based Divergent Talent and is published by Samuel French.

Shannon Devlin is a social and gender historian of nineteenth-century Ireland. Her research interests lie in the Irish middle classes and middle-class family. Shannon’s research explores the role of kin in social networking, family finances, family reputation and strategy. In 2020, she completed her PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently developing this research into a monograph. Shannon previously published her research on Irish girls’ education in Women’s History Review and through the Centre for Public History at QUB. In 2022, she was a Fellow at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania undertaking research into the role of siblings in Irish nineteenth-century migration networks. She is a member of the Women’s History Association of Ireland, the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the Irish Association of Professional Historians, and the Royal Historical Society.

Amanda Finch is an early career researcher (PhD), from Drama at Ulster University, whose current research explores the relationship between gender, violence and comedy, using contemporary performances of Shakespeare as case studies. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, gender and social justice, the representation of gendered violence in theatre, and the role of costume in the representation of gender. She has extensive experience as a drama educator and has been designing and creating costumes for six years.

Gerard Gibson is an early career researcher (PhD), from Cinematic Arts at Ulster University. He has a background in the visual arts and experience as a designer, illustrator and educator. His researches look at how horror stories are conveyed by the spaces, places and things that are used to tell them. Each object and every space and place bring their own set of histories, associations and qualities with them. Horror takes these things and twists them just slightly beyond the familiar making even the most normal things uncanny. Gerard’s studies into the design and meaning of these unreliable materials tells us much about what horror allows us to do and how it challenges the certainties of life and being, uncovering the ways we think about ourselves, the world around us and how we believe our worlds work.