Bold Girls By Rona Munro

Getting Your Head Around Bold Girls

Rona Munro wrote Bold Girls as a stage play, though it was later adapted into a television series for the BBC. The play centers on four women from different backgrounds in Belfast during the Troubles, dealing with grief, trauma, and the complicated process of trying to move forward. It premiered in 1994 at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and it's one of those plays that looks straightforward on the surface but actually requires a careful hand to mount successfully. If you're looking to work with this text, whether as a student, a director, or someone putting on a regional production, the first thing you need to understand is what you're actually handling. Munro's script is deceptively simple. The dialogue feels natural, almost conversational, but beneath that there's a lot of structural precision holding everything together. The four main characters are Pearl, Biddy, Kitty, and Annie, each representing different facets of Northern Irish society — Protestant, Catholic, unionist, republican. What makes the play interesting is how their stories overlap and diverge without ever becoming a political lecture. Munro trusts the audience to make connections on their own. I spent a few years ago working with a local theatre company that wanted to stage Bold Girls. We ran into an issue with casting because the role of Pearl, the loyalist woman whose daughter goes missing, has a specific rhythm to her speech that's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. The text is written in Ulster Scots dialect in places, but it's not a caricature. If you play it too broadly, it tips into stereotype very quickly. What I ended up doing was bringing in a dialect coach who had spent time in East Belfast, and we spent a week just getting the actors comfortable with the cadence before we even started blocking. The difference was massive. It went from feeling like an attempt at an accent to something that actually grounded the characters in a real place.

One of the counter-intuitive things about this play is that the quieter scenes are often the hardest to pull off. There's a whole stretch in the second half where very little happens on the surface — the women are sitting around, talking, dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy. Beginners tend to fiddle with the pacing here, adding business or movement to fill the silence. That's the wrong move. The silence is doing the work. Let it breathe. I've seen productions where the director kept cutting into those moments, and it drained the scene of its real power. The tension in Bold Girls comes from what's held back, not what's shown. Another thing people often get wrong is the relationship between the four women. They're not just plot devices representing different communities. Munro writes them as specific individuals with their own histories, resentments, and loyalties. The scene between Biddy and Kitty, where they confront their differences, works only if you treat it as a clash between two real people who have been friends for decades, not as a symbolic stand-in for the sectarian divide. If you direct it as an allegory, the play collapses into something preachy. Direct it as a human drama, and the politics become far more devastating because they're earned through character rather than stated outright. From a practical standpoint, getting your hands on the script is straightforward. The play is published by Nick Hern Books, which is the standard publisher for contemporary British and Irish drama. You can order it directly from their website, pick it up from major book retailers, or find it through theatrical suppliers. The published edition includes some useful stage directions and performance notes that aren't always obvious from the dialogue alone. It's worth reading through those carefully before you get into rehearsal, because they tell you something about how Munro envisions the physical world of the play.

Here's a blunt note about mounting this play. It's not particularly difficult from a technical standpoint — the set is essentially a living room and a kitchen, and the cast is small — but it demands a high level of acting commitment. If you're working with student actors or amateur companies that aren't ready for the emotional register this script requires, you'll struggle. The play doesn't forgive half-measures. There's a scene in the final act where Pearl breaks down, and it's written so precisely that it can feel contrived if the actor hasn't done the groundwork. I saw a student production once where the actress went for big emotion too fast and it came across as manipulative. The fix was simpler than you'd think: she just slowed it down and played the moment with restraint instead. It hit harder in every way. The television adaptation starring Michelle Fairley, Claire Calbreath, and others is worth watching if you want to see how professional directors approach this material, but treat it as a reference point rather than a template. Peter Kosminsky's version made some editorial choices that work for screen but don't necessarily translate to the stage. The film fills in background details that the play leaves deliberately ambiguous, and that's fine for a different medium. On stage, the ambiguity is part of the point. If you're studying the play academically, there's a lot of material out there but also a lot of shallow analysis that reduces it to a political document. Munro herself has spoken about how frustrating it is when people treat Bold Girls as primarily about the Troubles rather than about human relationships. The conflict provides the pressure cooker, yes, but the play is really about loyalty, grief, and the ways women support each other when institutions fail them. Reading academic papers on it is useful, but don't let the criticism override your own response to the text. The best interpretations come from engaging with what's actually on the page rather than what other people have said should be there.

There's also the question of contemporary staging. Some directors have tried updating the setting or shifting the context to parallel other conflicts. This is a legitimate creative choice, but I'd recommend against it unless you have a very clear reason for doing so. The play is rooted in a specific time and place in Belfast, and stripping that away tends to weaken rather than strengthen the material. A well-done production that commits to the 1990s setting will connect with modern audiences because the themes are universal even though the specifics are localized. You don't need to make the play about current events for it to remain relevant. Performance rights for the play are handled through Nick Hern Books as well. If you're a theatre company looking to license it, you'll need to go through the proper channels. Don't try to work from a photocopy or an illegal PDF — not just because of copyright, but because the published script contains the authoritative version of the text. Different editions and early drafts exist, and they differ in ways that matter for performance. The Nick Hern edition is the one most people use in production, and it's the one Munro has supervised and approved. The play runs about two hours with an interval. The pacing is deliberate. Munro doesn't rush. If you're tempted to cut content to fit a shorter performance slot, resist that instinct. The scenes exist for a reason, and trimming them usually hurts the structural integrity more than it helps the runtime. A well-paced two-hour performance is better than a rushed ninety minutes. Audiences will sit with this material if you trust them to do so.

One last thing worth noting. Several of the actresses who have played these roles have gone on to significant careers. Michelle Fairley's performance in the TV version is probably the most widely seen, but stage productions by the Lyric Theatre Company and various regional companies have also featured strong work. If you're an actor preparing for an audition, don't assume you need to play the role as someone hardened or aggressive. The power in these parts comes from vulnerability disguised as normalcy. The women in Bold Girls are coping with extraordinary circumstances in very ordinary ways. That contrast is what makes the play work.