“Bold Girls” by Rona Munro is a dramatic play set in Ireland during “The Troubles”. The play centres around the lives of three women; Nora, Cassie and Marie and the hard times they come to face. Though the women’s husband’s have been killed or jailed, the women’s life must continue however their lives are suddenly unsettled when a young disturbing teenage girl appears, Deirdre, acting as a catalyst and disrupting the settled lives of these characters as well as unveiling well hidden truths.
Within this drama, the character Deirdre is on a search for the truth about her father and along the way she actually reveals the truths of the other central characters. Deirdre opens the first act with a monologue, describing the troubles of Ireland. We originally view her as a commentator “The sky is grey. There are hills in the back there, green.
I can’t hardly see them.. ” The “hills” acts as a symbol for the truth and suggests the start of her search while the “sky is grey” stands as a symbol for her journey.Deirdre is portrayed as a strange and almost crazy character, making the reader feel uneasy but as the play progresses we grow in more understanding of the character, her search for the truth about her father, Deirdre threatens to destroy everything the characters own, breaking each of the women’s dreams. Deirdre is first introduced to the central characters on page 18 when Marie brings her into her home, clothes her and feeds her.
She’s strangely quiet as she sits in the room with Cassie and Nora, only replying simply to their questions.The first hint of truth surfaces here when Deirdre speaks of Cassie. “I’ve seen you though,” but when Nora and Cassie ask where Deirdre had seen her, she just shrugs, building tension and suspense within the play. The biggest symbol of truth within the play is the knife which, shown throughout the acts, threatens to destroy everything on which the characters have built their hopes and dreams on. The knife is first introduced on page 24-24 where Deirdre shares her longing for a knife in her monologue. “I thought I’d like that.
A wee bit of hard truth you can hold in your hand and point where you liked,” though the monologue seems quite sadistic and violent, it suggests Deirdre’s hunger for the truth, which the knife now plays the role as the truth. Nora’s dream is for the perfect home. She hides behind the truth that her husband is abusive and that the relationship with her daughter Cassie is broken and disconnected, so to hide this trust she obsesses with making her home perfect, re-decorating often, replacing furniture and so on even just to have it destroyed again.Deirdre uses the knife to slash and destroy ‘fifteen yards of shiny, peach polyester’, hacking away at it until she’s breathless which represents the cosy domestic life from which Deirdre herself us excluded and revealing that Nora’s life is just a show. Cassie’s dream is to escape the person she has become and the life she leads to avoid the truth that her husband repulses her, she’s a failure as a daughter and a mother and she betrayed her best friend but having an affair with her husband who has no been killed.She secretly saves up ? 200 of stolen money from her mother, Nora, to leave however Deirdre watches her secretly as she hides it behind a picture of Marie’s husband a steals it.
This destroys Cassie’s dream of escape, leaving her to face the consequences of her actions. Marie’s dream is to continue living her life in the belief that she has the perfect family and that her husband had always been faithful however due to the chain reaction of Deirdre’s actions, the truth about Marie’s family is unveiled.After the truth about Cassie and Marie’s husband affair is revealed, Deirdre returns to Marie’s home, demanding the truth from her as she waves the knife around on page 77. “I want the truth from you and I mean it” However the most dramatic use of the knife is by Marie and she wrestles it from Deirdre and begins to shred the picture of her husband with the knife repeatedly in her own discovery of truth.The destroying of her husbands picture holds an specific meaning as this picture had dominated the set of the drama throughout the whole play and with the destroying of the picture, Marie has released his hold over her and therefore have been gifted a new beginning. “Bold Girls” is a very dramatic and moving play in which a character battles to unveil the truth, having a life changing effect on the other central characters.
In the end it leaves the reader pondering if the truth is actually always necessary or desirable. I enjoyed the play and found it exciting and engaging.
