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Marie Jones

Sarah Marie Jones OBE (born 1951) is a Northern Irish actress and playwright based in Belfast, renowned for her contributions to theatre amid the social and political upheavals of the Troubles.^[1]^[2] Raised in a working-class Protestant family in East Belfast, Jones began her acting career with the Group Theatre alongside director James Young before co-founding the all-female Charabanc Theatre Company in 1983 to create opportunities for women performers and address underrepresented narratives in Northern Irish drama.^[2]^[3]^[4] Serving as Writer-in-Residence for Charabanc from 1983 to 1990, she co-authored ensemble plays drawing on local histories and community experiences, such as Oul Delf and False Teeth, before establishing the DubbelJoint Theatre Company in 1991 to continue producing politically engaged works.^[4]^[5] Her most acclaimed work, the 1996 two-hander Stones in His Pockets, a tragicomic exploration of Hollywood filming in rural Ireland and its impact on locals, garnered international success with extended runs in London's West End and on Broadway, earning Olivier Award and Tony Award nominations for Best Play.^[6]^[7]^[8] Jones has also acted in films including In the Name of the Father (1993) and Philomena (2013), and received the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to drama as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Ulster Tatler in 2017.^[1]^[9]^[3]

Early Life and Background

Family Origins and Childhood in Belfast

Marie Jones was born Sarah Marie Jones on 29 August 1955 in East Belfast to a working-class Protestant family.^[10]^[11] She grew up in the city's Protestant working-class neighbourhoods, where economic conditions were shaped by reliance on industries such as shipbuilding.^[10]^[12] During the 1950s, Jones's childhood unfolded in a period of relative pre-Troubles stability in East Belfast, before the sectarian conflict intensified in the late 1960s.^[12] As the children of shipyard workers, she and her peers played freely on the streets, indicative of the communal dynamics in these areas prior to widespread violence.^[12] The working-class environment of East Belfast exposed Jones early to the vernacular speech patterns and storytelling traditions of Protestant communities, amid underlying sectarian divisions that demarcated neighbourhoods along religious lines.^[10]^[13] These factors, including limited economic resources, contributed to a formative context emphasizing everyday resilience among ordinary residents.^[10]

Entry into Acting and Theatre Influences

Marie Jones initiated her acting career in the late 1960s at the Group Theatre in Belfast, inspired by the performances of comedian James Young. At age 16, she attended one of Young's shows at the venue and wrote to him for advice on entering the profession, prompting an invitation to audition for a new play where she secured a role after a stage test. This abrupt immersion, described by Jones as being "thrown in at the deep end," marked her professional debut and provided intensive, on-the-job training in delivering character-driven performances.^[14] Working alongside Young at the Group Theatre exposed Jones to Northern Ireland's regional theatre milieu during the onset of the Troubles, where productions often featured satirical sketches and monologues depicting everyday Ulster life to navigate social tensions. Young's style, rooted in humorous yet grounded observations of working-class Protestant communities—similar to those in which Jones grew up—emphasized realistic ensemble dynamics over stylized abstraction, fostering her early skills in authentic dialogue and relatable character interpretation. The Group's evolution into a hub for Ulster comedy under Young's influence reinforced a tradition of accessible, community-reflective theatre that prioritized direct human interactions amid Belfast's cultural volatility.^[2]^[15]^[16] By the mid-1970s, Jones expanded her experience through the Young Lyric Players, a youth-oriented group affiliated with Belfast's Lyric Theatre that aimed to transition emerging talent from amateur to professional levels, further building her proficiency in collaborative, regionally focused productions. These initial roles underscored persistent gender imbalances in casting, with limited opportunities for women in dominant ensembles, which practically spurred her shift toward creating dedicated spaces for female narratives in subsequent ventures.^[10]

Theatre Company Involvement

Charabanc Theatre Company Foundations and Contributions

Charabanc Theatre Company was founded in Belfast in 1983 by five actresses—Marie Jones, Eleanor Methven, Maureen McAuley, Carol Scanlan, and Brenda Winter—frustrated by the scarcity of substantive roles for women in Northern Ireland's male-dominated theatre scene.^[17]^[18] The company adopted a collaborative model, with members collectively researching and devising plays drawn from oral histories and testimonies of working-class women, emphasizing site-specific performances in non-traditional venues such as factories, community halls, and workplaces to reach underserved audiences directly.^[19] This approach prioritized accessibility and relevance over established theatre circuits, fostering engagement with communities often overlooked by subsidized arts institutions.^[20] The company's inaugural production, Lay Up Your Ends (premiered May 15, 1983, at the Arts Theatre), dramatized the 1911 Belfast linen mill workers' strike, incorporating interviews with descendants of participants to capture authentic women's experiences of economic hardship and solidarity amid industrial decline.^[21]^[19] Subsequent works followed this pattern of empirical research into local histories, touring extensively to build audiences through word-of-mouth and repeat viewings rather than heavy reliance on state grants, which enabled financial viability via ticket sales and community support in an era of funding constraints for independent groups.^[22] By 1990, Charabanc had produced over a dozen plays, sustaining operations with minimal external subsidies and demonstrating a viable alternative to dependency on public arts bodies.^[5] Charabanc's contributions centered on elevating underrepresented voices, particularly those of Protestant and working-class women in Northern Ireland, by foregrounding shared socioeconomic struggles—such as unemployment and gender inequities—over sectarian divisions that dominated contemporary discourse.^[19] Performances drew mixed Protestant and Catholic working-class attendees, promoting cross-community dialogue through relatable human narratives rather than politicized allegories, thus countering the polarization prevalent in state-funded theatre of the Troubles era.^[23] This focus not only created opportunities for female performers and writers but also documented empirical realities of deindustrialization and labor history from a grassroots perspective, influencing subsequent community-oriented theatre practices.^[18]

Transition to DubbelJoint and Collaborative Productions

Following her resignation from Charabanc Theatre Company in 1990 after seven years of involvement, Marie Jones co-founded DubbelJoint Theatre Company in 1991 with Pam Brighton and Mark Lambert.^[4]^[24] Headquartered in West Belfast, the company operated as an independent entity focused on new writing that addressed local issues of culture and identity, with its name reflecting a deliberate fusion of Dub(lin) and Bel(fast) to symbolize cross-border collaboration.^[25]^[24] The transition adapted Charabanc's ensemble-based, grassroots approach to a more inclusive, cross-sectarian model suited to the persistent sectarian tensions and shifting political landscape of early 1990s Northern Ireland, where the Troubles continued amid nascent peace efforts.^[24] While retaining collaborative production ethics rooted in community voices, DubbelJoint incorporated broader social critiques beyond gender-specific narratives, as evident in its inaugural production Hang All the Harpers that same year.^[24] This evolution prioritized bridging divides over sectarian alignment, enabling works that challenged entrenched identities without ideological constraints.^[24] DubbelJoint professionalized operations by generating professional-grade scripts, programmes, flyers, and press releases, yet preserved accessibility through engagement with local themes and participants, even as it confronted funding volatility—including later Arts Council withdrawals—that threatened but did not erode its independence.^[25]^[24] These structural innovations yielded empirical gains, such as expanded cross-border and international touring for key productions, which sustained the company's relevance by linking artistic output to real-world impact rather than conforming to polarized norms.^[24]^[2]

Playwriting Career

Key Plays and Chronological Development

Jones's playwriting career commenced in the early 1980s through collaborations with the Charabanc Theatre Company, which she co-founded in 1983. She co-authored the company's debut production, Lay Up Your Ends, addressing Belfast's linen mill workers, and contributed to subsequent ensemble scripts developed from community research, including Now You're Talking (1985), Gold in the Streets (1986), The Girls in the Big Picture (1986), and Somewhere Over the Balcony (1989).^[2]^[26] These works marked her initial foray into theatre rooted in Northern Irish social issues, produced annually until Charabanc's disbandment in 1990. After co-founding DubbelJoint Theatre Company in 1991, Jones shifted toward more individualized authorship while retaining collaborative production elements. Her adaptation of Gogol's The Government Inspector premiered in 1993, touring Ireland and Britain. This was followed by the monodrama A Night in November, which debuted on August 8, 1994, at the Belfast Institute of Further Education under DubbelJoint production, capturing a Protestant man's epiphany amid Northern Ireland's 1994 FIFA World Cup qualification amidsectarian tensions.^[27]^[28] In 1996, Jones achieved international breakthrough with Stones in His Pockets, a two-hander premiered on August 7 at the Dublin Theatre Festival by DubbelJoint, depicting film extras in rural Ireland. The play transferred to London's West End in 1999, running until February 2003, and opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre on April 1, 2001, earning Tony Award nominations for Best Play while accumulating 176 performances.^[6]^[29]^[30] Its format exemplified Jones's evolution from multi-character ensemble pieces to compact, versatile two-handers, facilitating global stagings after translations into 38 languages.^[31] Jones continued producing works into the 2010s, including Sinners, a satire on religious influence, family dynamics, and economic greed in rural Northern Ireland, which premiered at Belfast's Lyric Theatre in May 2017. This later play sustained her focus on societal critiques through accessible, character-driven narratives, building on the commercial and critical viability demonstrated by her 1990s output.^[32]^[33]

Stylistic Elements and Thematic Focus

Jones's plays feature vernacular dialogue drawn from Belfast's working-class idiom, employing earthy language that mixes sharp satire with humor to underscore human absurdities and elicit both laughter and pathos.^[34] This stylistic choice grounds narratives in authentic speech patterns, avoiding abstracted or sentimentalized portrayals of Irish life.^[34] Minimalist structures, such as in Stones in His Pockets, rely on two actors embodying up to 15 characters through rapid role-switching, amplifying comedic deflation of pretensions like Hollywood's exploitation of local culture while demanding virtuosic performance to convey multiplicity.^[35] Thematic focus recurs on class dynamics, religious tensions, and identity formation, portraying individuals navigating greed, familial loyalties, and cultural clashes through personal agency rather than deterministic victimhood.^[32] In A Night in November, satire exposes Protestant bigotry via a protagonist's epiphany at a football match, critiquing sectarian prejudices without partisan exoneration of opposing flaws, thus emphasizing causal self-examination over glorified conflict.^[28] Monologic forms in such works facilitate introspective journeys, deconstructing rigid identities to reveal empirical realities of shared humanity amid division.^[28] Critics commend this approach for bridging communal divides, as evidenced by productions attracting Protestant, Catholic, and international audiences through balanced empathy that prompts cross-sectarian reflection.^[34] Her sustained neutrality amid Northern Ireland's polarized politics enables such resonance, prioritizing individual causal realism—e.g., prejudice as personal failing—over systemic narratives, though this has drawn occasional note for tempering explicit calls to structural reform.^[36] Sell-out runs and translations into 27 languages affirm the empirical breadth of her appeal, countering insular interpretations.^[34]

Acting Career

Stage Performances

Jones's stage acting career commenced in her youth at the Group Theatre in Belfast, where she performed in James Young's revue productions starting at age fifteen, gaining initial experience in local theatre that emphasized working-class narratives and humor rooted in Northern Irish life.^[10] This early immersion honed her ability to deliver authentic, observational performances drawn from everyday Belfast dialects and social dynamics.^[2] As a founding member of Charabanc Theatre Company in 1983, Jones took on ensemble roles in their collaborative, research-driven productions, which toured intimate venues across Northern Ireland and emphasized women's perspectives on labor and community issues.^[37] In the company's debut play, Lay Up Your Ends (1983), she acted alongside co-founders in portraying linen mill workers during a 1970 strike, employing naturalistic delivery to capture the rhythms of proletarian speech and resilience amid economic hardship.^[38] Subsequent Charabanc credits included roles in Now You're Talkin' (1985), addressing housing struggles, and The Girls in the Big Picture (1986), focused on wartime factory women, where her performances contributed to the group's method of embodying characters through collective improvisation and empirical fieldwork.^[4] These experiences directly sharpened her ear for unfiltered vernacular, enabling later playwriting that mirrored rehearsal-derived cadences without artifice. Following Charabanc's evolution into DubbelJoint in 1991, Jones appeared less frequently on stage but reprised or supported roles in revivals of her works, such as ensemble contributions in Oul' Delf and False Teeth (1987 original, with later stagings), underscoring her commitment to authentic portrayals of aging and domesticity in working-class settings.^[4] Her acting across these productions fostered a causal link to her writing, as physical immersion in roles facilitated first-hand insight into character motivations, yielding scripts grounded in observable behaviors rather than abstracted ideals.^[13]

Film and Television Roles

Jones transitioned to screen acting in the early 1990s, beginning with a supporting role as Sarah Conlon, the steadfast mother of the wrongfully convicted Gerry Conlon, in Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1993), a film depicting the Guildford Four's ordeal amid the Troubles.^[39] Her Belfast origins informed the portrayal of a working-class Protestant woman's resilience, utilizing authentic regional accents and mannerisms honed from her theatre background.^[1] In television, her appearances remained sparse but notable, including the role of Peggy in the BBC Northern Ireland miniseries Eureka Street (1999), where she featured in three episodes adapting Robert McLiam Wilson's novel about divided Belfast life during the peace process era. This work extended her stage expertise to screen depictions of everyday Northern Irish domesticity without veering into caricature. Later film roles underscored her selective approach, such as Mrs. Doyle in Richard Attenborough's Closing the Ring (2007), a drama intertwining World War II secrets with contemporary Northern Ireland settings.^[40] In 2013, she took a brief but ensemble-supporting part as Barman's Mum in Stephen Frears' Philomena, portraying a peripheral figure in the story of institutional abuse and personal reckoning, alongside leads Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.^[41] These roles prioritized authenticity in grounded characters over prolific output, allowing Jones to sidestep typecasting while highlighting nuanced Northern Irish vernacular and stoicism derived from lived experience.^[1]

Reception and Impact

Awards and Professional Recognition

In 2002, Marie Jones was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to drama in Northern Ireland.^[4] She received honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster, recognizing her contributions to literature and theatre.^[42] Additional honors include the John Hewitt Award for outstanding contributions to culture, tradition, and the arts in Northern Ireland, as well as a Special Judges Award at the Belfast Arts Awards.^[4] In 2017, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement accolade at the Ulster Tatler Awards for her enduring impact on Belfast's theatrical landscape.^[43] Jones's play Stones in His Pockets (1996) earned widespread professional acclaim, securing the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2001 following its West End run.^[7] The production received three nominations at the 55th Tony Awards in 2001, including Best Play and Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for both Sean Campion and Conleth Hill. It also garnered a Drama Desk Special Award for the performers' unique two-hander portrayal of 15 characters, alongside a special achievement recognition from the Outer Critics Circle.^[29] The play won the American Drama Critics' Circle Award, reflecting its critical validation in the U.S. after a sold-out Broadway engagement that ran for 198 performances.^[42] These recognitions correlate with empirical markers of success, such as Stones in His Pockets' four-year West End tenure, Broadway extension, and translations into 38 languages, which sustained over 2,000 global performances and reached audiences exceeding one million.^[42] Earlier, the play claimed the Irish Times/ESB Theatre Award for Best Production in 1999, tied to its debut runs drawing record attendance at Dublin's Abbey Theatre and Belfast venues.^[2] Such metrics affirm the work's accessibility and commercial viability, prioritizing narrative clarity and humor over subsidized abstraction.

Critical Analysis and Viewpoints on Her Work

Scholars have commended Marie Jones's deployment of humor and monological structures in works such as A Night in November (1994) for facilitating protagonists' personal reckonings with sectarian prejudice, thereby prioritizing individual agency and ethical transformation over entrenched collective trauma frameworks.^[28] This approach, exemplified by Kenneth McCallister's rejection of Protestant bigotry at a 1993 football match and subsequent embrace of broader Irish affinities, is seen as innovatively reshaping Northern Irish dramatic conventions to underscore personal accountability amid communal hatred.^[28] Such elements earned the play the TMA Best Touring Production Award in 2002, reflecting its role in prompting empathetic cross-community engagements through exaggerated yet relatable character sketches critiquing both sectarianism and middle-class complacency.^[28] Critiques, however, highlight limitations in this neutrality, with reviewers arguing that Jones's narratives veer into sentimental nationalism, romanticizing Irish unity via motifs like World Cup solidarity while offering an unconvincing resolution to Ulster's divided identities and unduly pathologizing Protestant conformity.^[44] Certain analyses detect a nationalist tilt that marginalizes Protestant cultural depth, potentially aligning with academic tendencies—prevalent in left-leaning Irish studies—to valorize counter-narratives against unionist norms without equally scrutinizing republican paramilitary initiations of violence, such as IRA campaigns that empirically drove much of the Troubles' escalation.^[28] From Protestant-leaning perspectives, this focus on intra-community bigotry risks equivalence between actors in the conflict, evading causal asymmetries where loyalist responses often followed republican aggressions, though Jones's Belfast Protestant upbringing informs authentic depictions of working-class loyalism.^[44] Diverse viewpoints contrast her successes in theatrical democratization—Stones in His Pockets (1996) achieving over 500 performances in one production alone and global translations—with apprehensions that commercial viability favors escapist humor over unflinching realism in addressing rural disenfranchisement and identity commodification by external industries.^[45] While the play's two-actor format and satirical lens on Hollywood intrusions enhanced accessibility, critics note its stereotype-driven caricature can dilute gritty causal examinations of economic despair, prioritizing audience appeal amid revivals that sometimes falter in sustaining dramatic momentum.^[45] Counterarguments emphasize empirical dialogue outcomes, including the plays' staging in diverse venues fostering post-performance discussions on shared Northern Irish experiences, substantiating their utility beyond perceived evasions.^[28]

Personal Life and Views

Marriage, Family, and Later Years

Marie Jones has been married to Northern Irish actor Ian McElhinney since the 1970s.^[46] ^[47] The couple has three sons: Darren, Matthew, and David.^[47] Public details about their family life remain limited, reflecting a preference for privacy amid Jones's professional commitments in Belfast.^[48] In recent years, intergenerational ties to theatre have surfaced through her son Matthew McElhinney, an actor and director who helmed a 2024 revival of Jones's play Stones in His Pockets at venues including the Barn Theatre in Cirencester and the Octagon in Bolton.^[49] ^[50] This production marked a continuation of the play's legacy under family oversight, with McElhinney drawing on personal familiarity from its original runs.^[51] Jones's later career, into her seventies, has emphasized selective engagement rather than full retirement, including consultations on revivals and occasional new writings.^[50] ^[14] She has described maintaining a low-key routine focused on writing and reflection in Belfast, without indications of withdrawing from creative involvement.^[52]^[53]

Perspectives on Northern Irish Society and Politics

Marie Jones, raised in a working-class Protestant family in east Belfast, approached Northern Irish society through plays that emphasized individual moral shortcomings—such as bigotry, hypocrisy, and parochialism—over collective ideological justifications for conflict.^[52]^[54] Her works critiqued entrenched prejudices within unionist communities, portraying characters who confront personal failings amid the Troubles' violence, rather than romanticizing loyalist or nationalist causes as inherent virtues or victimhoods.^[28]^[55] This lens rejected media-amplified narratives of one-sided oppression, instead grounding societal dysfunction in empirical observations of everyday human flaws that perpetuated division.^[56] In line with her co-founding of Charabanc Theatre Company in 1983, Jones explicitly avoided aligning her storytelling with sectarian ideologies, prioritizing narratives drawn from ordinary lives to expose the absurdities of tribalism without endorsing partisan agendas.^[57] Her dramatic focus on small-scale, relatable experiences—such as workplace tensions or community rituals—served to debunk oversimplified "victim Olympics" in public discourse, highlighting how personal greed and insularity, rather than abstract historical grievances, sustained cycles of antagonism during and after the Troubles.^[58]^[34] Conservative-leaning commentators have praised Jones's oeuvre for underscoring individual agency and ethical reckonings as prerequisites for reconciliation, evident in audience responses to her pre-Good Friday Agreement works that presaged the 1998 peace process by illustrating breakthroughs via personal epiphanies over structural impositions.^[59]^[60] Conversely, progressive critics have faulted her for underemphasizing systemic imperialism or republican narratives, viewing her character-driven realism as insufficiently interrogating power imbalances in favor of apolitical humanism, though her empirical depictions of cross-community failings challenge such ideologically laden framings.^[55]^[61] This tension reflects broader debates on whether her avoidance of grand causal theories—favoring causal chains rooted in observable behaviors—better captures the preconditions for post-1998 stability than deterministic accounts of oppression.^[62]

Legacy

Influence on Contemporary Theatre

Marie Jones's involvement with the Charabanc Theatre Company in the 1980s exemplified early female-led, collaborative playmaking drawn from community testimonies, particularly working-class women's experiences in Northern Ireland, which influenced subsequent ensembles by prioritizing grassroots narratives over elite abstractions.^[63] This approach fostered intimate, participatory drama that bypassed traditional hierarchies, enabling broader access to theatre creation amid the Troubles' social fragmentation.^[64] Her innovation in multi-role playing, as in Stones in His Pockets (premiered 1996), where two performers portray over a dozen characters, has been widely emulated for its logistical efficiency—requiring minimal casts and sets—while enhancing audience intimacy through rapid shifts that mirror communal storytelling dynamics.^[65] This technique, rooted in resource-constrained Northern Irish productions, has permeated global theatre practices, facilitating economical revivals in diverse venues from regional U.S. repertories to international tours.^[66] Jones contributed to a stylistic pivot in Northern Irish theatre toward grounded realism infused with humor, diverging from prior emphases on historical allegory or sectarian symbolism, which allowed post-1998 Good Friday Agreement works to emphasize everyday absurdities and shared human frailties as vehicles for cross-community empathy.^[67] Plays like A Night in November (1994) demonstrated this by depicting a Protestant man's epiphany of Irish solidarity through football, empirically correlating with audience reflections on identity fluidity that predated and paralleled reconciliation efforts.^[28] Quantitatively, Stones in His Pockets exemplifies enduring merit: originating at Belfast's Lyric Theatre, it achieved a four-year West End run starting 2000, garnered international stagings across continents, and sustained productions into 2025—nearly three decades post-premiere—outlasting many contemporaneous politically themed works that faded after initial controversy.^[68] ^[50] This longevity underscores a causal preference for Jones's merit-driven accessibility over transient ideological framing, as evidenced by repeated commissions and adaptations in post-conflict repertoires.^[69]

Recent Revivals and Ongoing Relevance

In 2024, a revival of Stones in His Pockets toured the United Kingdom, opening at the Barn Theatre in Cirencester from August 23 to September 14, before transferring to venues including the Octagon Theatre Bolton (October 22 to November 2) and Salisbury Playhouse.^[49]^[70]^[71] Directed by Jones's son, Matthew McElhinney, the production marked the play's 25th anniversary with an immersive staging that emphasized its tragicomic exploration of rural Irish life disrupted by Hollywood filmmaking, earning praise for virtuoso performances amid critiques of uneven dramatic momentum.^[49]^[72] Concurrent with this, A Night in November received U.S. stagings, including at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota from February 21 to March 15, 2024, where actor James Evans portrayed 23 characters in the one-man show depicting a Protestant man's epiphany amid Northern Ireland's sectarian divides during the 1994 World Cup.^[73]^[74] Reviews highlighted its enduring relevance to themes of identity and fanaticism, with the production underscoring the play's capacity to provoke reflection on cultural and political exploitation without dilution.^[75] Looking to 2025, Hedgerow Theatre Company in Pennsylvania scheduled Fly Me to the Moon for its season opener from October 15 to November 2, a dark comedy by Jones examining temptation and absurdity in everyday Irish life, directed by Emma Gibson.^[76]^[77] These post-2020 productions, spanning continents and plays, demonstrate empirical demand for Jones's oeuvre, with sustained stagings refuting claims of obsolescence through adaptations that preserve her unvarnished critiques of societal causalities—such as economic intrusion and tribal loyalties—resistant to contemporary ideological overlays.^[49]^[73]

References

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Marie Jones - IMDb
Marie Jones was born in 1951 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. She is an actress and writer, known for In the Name of the Father (1993), Philomena (2013) and ...Missing: notable | Show results with:notable
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Marie Jones OBE is a Belfast-based actress and playwright. She was one of the core founding members of Charabanc Theatre Company in 1983, and in 1991 she ...
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an OBE (Order of the British Empire). We are delighted to welcome her to The Helicon where she will talk about her stellar career with David Grant ...<|control11|><|separator|>
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Lay Up Your Ends (script) - extraORDINARYwomenNI
Extract from a photocopied script for 'Lay Up Your Ends,' by playwright Marie Jones, for Charabanc Theatre Company. Full script available at the Linen Hall ...Missing: Lie cast
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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107207/
[40]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488380/
[41]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2431286/
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Marie Jones | Lyric Theatre Belfast
Marie's plays have toured extensively throughout the world, including the former Soviet Union, Germany, coast to coast America, Canada, Britain and Ireland.
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Belfast playwright Marie Jones honoured at Ulster Tatler Awards
Sep 15, 2017 · Belfast playwright Marie Jones has been honoured with the Lifetime Achievement accolade at this year's Ulster Tatler Awards.
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Marie Jones - Ricorso.net
1951- [Sarah “Marie” Jones]; b. Belfast; co-fnd. Charabanc Company with Maureen Macauley, Carol Scanlon Moore, Eleanor Methven and Brenda Winter, ...
[45]
A Night in November | Theatre | The Guardian
Jun 13, 2002 · A Night in November ... Marie Jones is unafraid of stereotypes: that is what makes her plays so problematic and fascinating. No matter how ...Missing: criticism | Show results with:criticism
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Marie Jones - Biography - IMDb
Marie Jones was born in 1951 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. She is an actress and writer, known for In the Name of the Father (1993), Philomena (2013) and ...
[47]
Me and my health: Marie Jones | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
Aug 7, 2008 · She is married to actor Ian McIlhinney and they have three sons, Darren (35), Matthew (19) and David (14). Do you get eight hours sleep a night?
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A family drama | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
Apr 9, 2010 · For the first time, writer Marie Jones, her director husband Ian McElhinney and their actor son Matthew are working on the one play.
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Stones in His Pockets review – immersive revival of the rural Ireland ...
Sep 1, 2024 · Marie Jones's 1996 hit play is given a spectacular, Hollywood-style makeover by her son Matthew McElhinney, though the momentum of the drama suffers.
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Stones in His Pockets: Playwright Marie Jones on her hit work that's ...
Jul 28, 2025 · Belfast playwright Marie Jones says she has seen enough productions, including poorly executed ones of her hit play, Stones in His Pockets, ...
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Marie Jones and Matthew Mcelhinney reflect on the legacy of ...
On the upcoming 25th Anniversary production, that is helmed by her son Matthew McElhinney and begins performances at Cirencester's Barn Theatre from 27 July ( ...
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Playwright Marie Jones: 'My mother told me there was no such thing ...
Apr 7, 2024 · Jones lives in middle-class southeast Belfast with her husband Ian McElhinney. His background is somewhat posher. “He's a son of the preacher ...Missing: origins | Show results with:origins
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Belfast playwright Marie Jones: When my mum was in a home, we ...
Jan 21, 2019 · Fly Me to the Moon, a comedy by Belfast playwright Marie Jones, draws on her mother's experiences of living in a care home in the final years of her life.
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[PDF] comedy, comic traditions, and the troubles in the works of
Marie Jones was born and raised in East Belfast in a chiefly. Protestant ... Chapter three analyzes Marie Jones's Troubles' plays with Charabanc, as well as.
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Kicking with Both Feet?: Marie Jones's "A Night in November" - jstor
through what she writes and shapes for performance. A Night in November was first produced on 8 August 1994 by. Dubbeljoint Productions at Belfast Institute of ...Missing: leaves | Show results with:leaves
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Marie-Louise Muir's Arts Extra: Marie Jones & Sam Millar - BBC
What struck me was how differently the two playwrights approached contemporary Northern Irish society. For Jones, it was about tapping into a cultural shift ...
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[PDF] The Counter-Narratives of Northern Irish Women Playwrights, 1980 ...
When addressing the contributions of Northern Irish women playwrights,. Irish scholarship tends to cite Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, and Marie Jones, along with ...
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A night in november - Troubles Archive
Marie Jones transits perceived boundaries of religion, class and gender, epitomised by the voyage of Protestant Kenneth McCallister in A Night in November. As ...
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A Night in November - Variety
Mar 19, 2006 · ... Marie Jones' "A Night in November," a feel-good piece that debuted in 1994 and made international waves with its pacifist message regarding ...
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Contemporary northern Irish Theatre: challenging the Union?
Marie Jones is a Belfast actress who started writing for the stage as part of Charabanc, a collaborative venture set up in 1983 with a strong basis in community ...
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Loyal Women? Marie Jones and Christina Reid - Oxford Academic
While both writers profess Irish identifications, both tend to emphasize and explore social class along with gender in their lives and work.
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What really happened at Windsor Park that 'night in November' 1993?
Nov 23, 2021 · Playwright Marie Jones, shocked by what she read in the Sunday papers, began developing the idea for 'A Night in November' - the fictional ...
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Women in Irish Theatre: the Charabanc - Revistas USP
79Women in Irish Theatre: the CharabancTheatre Company and Marie Jones ; 80The work of other women in the first half of the twentieth century has oftenbeen ...
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(PDF) Marie Jones - Academia.edu
This paper explores the contributions of playwright Marie Jones to contemporary theatre, particularly in relation to the cultural and social issues faced by ...
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Stones in His Pockets | San Luis Obispo Repertory Theatre
With just two actors playing over a dozen parts, Stones In His Pockets is a comedic yet tragic take on the effects of the Hollywood dream in a small Irish town.Missing: longevity | Show results with:longevity
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The Theatre of Marie Jones - Peter Lang Verlag
Marie Jones is one of the most prolific and popular writers working in Northern Irish theatre today. Her work has achieved local relevance and international ...
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(PDF) From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland
This paper examines the evolution of theatre in Northern Ireland from the Troubles to the post-conflict era, highlighting the necessity for playwrights to ...
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Stone in his Pockets star says Bolton is in for a real treat
Oct 27, 2024 · When it was first produced 25 years ago, Stones in his Pockets ran in London's West End for four years. ... “The writer Marie Jones and director ...Missing: longevity | Show results with:longevity
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The Theatre of Marie Jones: telling Stories from the Ground Up.
This volume of essays engages critically with Jones s oeuvre, her reception in Ireland and beyond, and her position in the canon of contemporary drama.<|separator|>
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Stones in his Pockets | Octagon Bolton
Directed by Matthew McElhinney, son of the play's writer and original director ... Marie Jones. Writer. Matthew McElhinney. Director. Gregor Donnelly. Designer ...
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Review: STONES IN HIS POCKETS, Salisbury Playhouse
Oct 3, 2024 · Review: STONES IN HIS POCKETS, Salisbury Playhouse. Modernised revival of Irish tragicomedy makes welcome return to the stage. By: Cheryl ...
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Stones in His Pockets tour reveals casting - WhatsOnStage
Jul 19, 2024 · Stones in His Pockets tour reveals casting. The production is a revival of the 25th anniversary staging. Theo Bosanquet. | UK Tour |.
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Florida Studio Theatre Reveals Lineup For 2024 Stage III Series
Dec 11, 2023 · Next up is the highly acclaimed Irish comedy, A Night in November by Marie Jones, which begins playing February 21 in FST's Bowne's Lab Theatre.
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70+ arts events opening in March in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte
Feb 28, 2024 · Florida Studio Theatre Keating Theatre, 1241 N. Palm Ave ... The one-man play “A Night in November” runs through March 15 in the ...
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KRISTIN CLIPPARD - Home
A Night in November by Marie Jones opens at Florida Studio Theatre on February 23 and runs through March 15. Actor James Evans plays 23 characters from ...
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Fly Me to the Moon — Hedgerow Theatre Company
” Irish playwright Marie Jones brings her signature wit to a dark comedy ... October 15 - November 2, 2025. by Marie Jones directed by Emma Gibson (Nora ...
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Hedgerow Theatre Will Open 2025–26 Season With Marie Jones ...
Sep 23, 2025 · Hedgerow Theatre Company will open its 2025–26 season with a new production of Fly Me to the Moon by Northern Irish playwright Marie Jones.