IT'S difficult to imagine that there was a time in our recent history when parents sent their children away to America during the summer to escape the violence on the streets. But it happened.
Project Children opened at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast last night, telling the story of those children who travelled to the States during the Troubles to stay with host families for up to six weeks during the summer.
Writer Fionnuala Kennedy interviewed many of the children – who are now adults – and it is their stories and experiences that shape the play and make Project Children such an emotional journey as we look back at what seems like another age where parents were so desperate to keep their children out of harms way that they sent them to complete strangers in another continent.
To that end, children as young as nine were shipped off to the States to stay with Irish-American families and it is those stories of leaving family behind that make the play so poignant as the children step into another world, far from the riots and the rain, and experience for the first time large family homes, shopping malls and stores instead of shops, barbeques and burgers and even outside garden pools.
But not all the kids were the same. Some were missing their families as soon as they were left off at the airport. Others couldn’t get away fast enough.
For over 40 years 23,000 children from both sides of the community availed of Project Children or similar schemes, and their testimonies – as told by the actors on stage – are both emotional and hilarious. Tony Devlin, Nicky Harley, Mary Moulds, Laura Hughes and James Doran on stage together
Actors Nicky Harley, Terence Keeley, Laura Hughes, Mary Mould and James Doran play all the parts. Brassneck’s director Tony Devlin has stepped in for Terence Keeley for the first couple of shows, with Keeley back on stage next week. As adults, their depiction of the children is particularly funny, but they also take on the roles of the American host families, Project Children founder Denis Mulcahy, and also the much put upon Monica Culbert and Sally Brennan – two volunteers from Belfast – who organise the scheme back home and have the arduous task of finding the children each year for the project, dealing with their families, and then looking after 300 hyper kids on a transAtantlic flight.
What started off as a trickle of children each year, soon led to chartered flights and hundreds heading off each July to New York, Boston and even Montana.
All of the action takes place on the spiked crown of the Statue of Liberty, while above the stage, a large screen is a visual reminder of the conflict on the streets which the children are fleeing from – but that is counterbalanced with clips of excited kids boarding their flights and speaking to reporters about their hopes and young dreams on the other side of the Atlantic.
Mary-Kate Page with James Dornan
There were many young people and children in the audience, who only for the ceasefire would have been today’s Project Children. I was accompanied to the performance by my 13-year-old daughter who identified with the children’s stories of a monochrome Belfast compared to the perceived colour that is the States.
Project Children is an enduring story of hope amidst the chaos and one which Fionnuala Kennedy and Brassneck must be commended in telling.
Funny, poignant and its message still relevant today.
Project Children runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until May but Brassneck Theatre are keen to take the work to the U.S. in 2025.
