The biggest ever cohort of playwrights, comedians and artists from Northern Ireland are bringing their work to the Edinburgh fringe this year, with performers crediting the success of Derry Girls for putting the country’s writing and comic talent on the map.
There will be 17 shows from Northern Ireland at the fringe this year, which the festival’s chief executive, Shona McCarthy, said was the biggest ever showing for the nation.
“It’s really exciting to see so much work across theatre and comedy. There’s more there than I’ve ever seen,” said McCarthy, who is originally from Northern Ireland.
Writers who spoke to the Guardian credited McCarthy’s support, along with a collaborative ethos in the arts community and renewed interest from international audiences, but warned that the lowest per capita government arts funding in the UK could hold back progress.
Festival performers added that Northern Ireland was enjoying a comedy boom, with local comedians selling out top arenas previously reserved for major international names, and comedy nights and clubs rapidly proliferating.
Joe Dougan, who manages most of the Northern Irish comedians performing at the fringe, said: “The Northern Ireland comedy scene has really exploded over the last few years, but the current crop of breaking talent has been in development for 10-15 years. Since 2019, an almost fully formed industry has emerged.”
Northern Irish comics benefit from a voice that is “darker and edgier” than elsewhere, as a post-conflict nation, while a national predilection for humour means they push themselves harder to make “a crowd of people who are themselves comedians” laugh, said comedian Ciaran Bartlett.
Another comedian, Paddy Raff, said that he thought audiences were more aware of Northern Ireland’s similarities to other parts of the UK and Ireland, and familiar with the accent after Derry Girls, the Channel 4 teen sitcom. “People are more open to it rather than wondering, ‘Is this guy Scottish? Is he drunk?’”
He thought the scene had developed thanks to a shift away from a cultural discomfort with showing off, which meant it was “not the done thing to stand up and be funny behind a microphone”. “We are coming round to the fact we’re just as funny as anybody else and it’s a bit of an epiphany.”
Niamh Flanagan, director at Theatre and Dance Northern Ireland, which is organising a showcase of the country’s theatre, added that plays were now being made that wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago.
One at Edinburgh is Two Fingers Up, a show which takes a critical look at religious influence on sex education in Northern Ireland and features the tagline “a country of wankers” – intended to celebrate masturbation.
Its creators, Gina Donnelly and Seón Simpson, were warned this might stop them getting funding, but they have received grants from Culture Ireland and Queen’s University Belfast.
“For a long time conservatism has censored the work but there’s now more of a desire to talk about global issues that affect Northern Ireland too – sexuality, class, gender politics – all those things that have been ignored in favour of looking at the Troubles,” said Donnelly.
Playwright Kat Woods, who is bringing her fifth play, Birds of Passage in the Half Light, to Edinburgh, said she thought other UK audiences had realised there was a “gap in teaching [about Northern Ireland] in schools”.
“There was a spike of interest when people started talking about Brexit. When people said it would be a bad thing for the union, for Northern Ireland, for a longer lasting peace, I got asked a lot of questions about it. That piqued interest in Northern Ireland, and Derry Girls has put us on the map,” she said.
Liam McMullan, who is producing a play, In the Name of the Son, about Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, who was wrongfully convicted of being an IRA bomber, added that audiences are interested in plays from Northern Ireland because they are “all true stories”.
However, Flanagan warned there remains a serious funding gap. “Funding towards the arts has been decimated since around about 2011. We’ve a bit of work to do collaboratively so that hopefully in the future the arts here will be better valued by the decision-makers. But there isn’t a government or an agreed budget so it’s very hard, there’s a lot of political instability still.”
• This article was amended on 3 August 2022. A show referred to as Two Fingers is Two Fingers Up. There was also a misspelling of one of the creator’s names: it is Seón, not Séon, Simpson.
