Output details

The Maidens' City Project

The script of 'The Maidens' City' was researched, written and delivered as a guided walking tour of the Derry walls by Anne Crilly. At least 12 different tours of Derry are offered but no narrative or acknowledgement of women’s history has ever been presented. This project offers just such a gendered narrative and attempts to do so in a novel way. The script is written for three actresses who take on multiple roles. The central character is Margaret Cousins, a suffragette who leads the dramatized walking tour and interacts with other historical, contemporary or imagined characters. This is a site-specific piece of theatre for the Walls of Derry and explores the relationship between the performance and this contested cultural space with its centuries of accumulated meanings.

The video, also directed and produced by Anne Crilly, documents the dramatized tour. It was filmed twice on one day with two crews and for the most part in a 'vérité' style to give the viewer the sense of being part of the tour, walking alongside the tour guide from location to location. The 2nd cameras were mainly used to take establishing shots of the tour audience from various vantage points along the Walls and this helped illustrate the site-specific nature of the drama. They also filmed the dramatic episodes from different angles, took close-ups of audience reaction and some cutaways of, for example, the Bogside and shots of the wall murals. This observational and participatory filming style meant that the editing was itself a complicated task, matching different angles of the interactive episodes. The research questions posed by a site-specific drama were substantial and the resulting novel mix of dramatised walking tour, historical recreation, documentary observation and location shooting establishes the process of re-imagining and re-inscribing of the city space that is so much a part of post-conflict Derry.