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Drama
Marie Jones
Marie (pronounced MAR' ee)
Jones was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1951. Working as an actress
there in the 1970s, where English actors were often imported to play leading
roles, she went to the Lyric Theatre one evening to see a play about dockworkers
written by local dramatist Martin Lynch. She had earlier attended performances
at a West Belfast community theater Lynch had founded, and after seeing Dockers
went with four other actresses to ask Lynch about writing short plays for
them to perform. He agreed, encouraged them to write themselves, and in 1983
the company Charabanc was founded with Jones as one of its driving forces.
Their first major success, Lay Up Your Ends, concerned a 1907 strike
in the textile mills of Belfast and was eventually performed in Dublin, London,
and Russia. In an interview, Jones recalls this unprecedented success another
"amazing" result of the play: American academics became interested in this
singular experiment in women's theater.
Jones soon became the principal writer for
Charabanc, with whom she worked until 1990 before setting out on her own as
both an actress and playwright. Since then, she has written such plays as
A Night in November (1994), Women on the Verge of HRT (1996),
and the critically acclaimed Stones in His Pockets, which opened in
West Belfast in 1996 before moving to London and New York. It won the 2001
Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy after its London opening, and the two
principal actors in the play won Tony Awards in New York the same year. It
began a world tour in 2002 and will be made into a film, although Jones has
expressed no interest in writing the screenplay.
In addition to these successes as a dramatist,
Marie Jones has also written extensively for BBC television and radio, and
continued to act on stage, radio, and in film. She appeared, for example,
in the major film In the Name of the Father (1993), starring Daniel
Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson, and Pete Postlethwaite. It was nominated for numerous
Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won numerous other international
film awards.
A Night in November, a one-man play
motivated by both the "troubles" in Northern Ireland and Ireland's trip to
the 1994 World Cup soccer finals, has been produced all over Ireland and the
United States. Its comic turns and optimism about the possibility of overturning
sectarian prejudice and the violence that it promotes provide a unique representation
of what has been one of the longest and bloodiest episodes in modern history.
Its success and that of Stones in His Pockets have made Marie Jones
a playwright of international reputation, a considerable distance from her
humble beginnings as a writer for and co-founder of a company of unemployed
actresses in Belfast.
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Selected Bibliography of Jones' Work
Lay Up Your Ends (with Martin Lynch, 1983)
‘Oul Delf and False Teeth (1984)
Now You're Talking (1985)
Gold on the Streets (1986)
Girls in the Big Picture (1987)
Somewhere Over the Balcony (1988)
The Hamster Wheel (1990)
A Night in November (1994)
Ethel Workman Is Innocent (1995)
Women on the Verge of HRT (1996)
Stones in His Pockets (1996/1999)
A Night to Remember (1998)
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Further Reading About Jones' Work
Cornell, Jennifer C. "‘The Other Community': Northern Ireland in British Television, 1995." New Hibernia Review 1.2 (Summer 1997): 37-47.
Gussow, Mel. "Introduction." Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones. New York: Applause Books, 2001. 6-11.
Lojek, Helen. "Playing Politics with Belfast's Charabanc Theatre Company." Politics and Performance in Northern Ireland. Ed. John P. Harrington and Elizabeth J. Mitchell. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999). 82-102.
Moylan, Pat. "Marie Jones in Conversation with Pat Moylan." Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners. Ed. Lilian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon, and Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001. 213-19.
Roche, Tony. "Northern Irish Drama: Imagining Alernatives," in Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995): 216-78.
Van Gelder, Lawrence. Review of A Night in November. New York Times, 28 February 1998.
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