On the face of it, Bold Girls is not a violent play. In form, Rona Munro’s 1990 four-hander has the raucous girls-night-out shape of the kind of comedy perfected by Kay Mellor or Marie Jones. It looks as if it’s all about the bonds of female friendship as three working-class Belfast women, plus mysterious hanger on, go from front room to nightclub and back again, growing loose lipped as the drink kicks in. None of that would suggest the male menace of Pinter or the macho explosiveness of Mamet, still less the shadow-of-a-gunman gangster dramas of Northern Ireland’s Troubles era.
Yet Bold Girls is absolutely about violence – male violence. Director Richard Baron reminds us as much from the start when a helicopter searchlight casts its roving beam across the audience, glaring into our eyes, before a dishevelled young woman is spotted in the haze of Stuart Jenkins’s severe side lighting. In this context, the living room of Lucianne McEvoy’s cool, calm and collected Marie is a refuge, a place of safety in a dangerous city.
As she and her neighbours, Nora (Deirdre Davis) and grown-up daughter Cassie (Scarlett Mack) get on with the tasks of family life – the laundry, the children’s tea, the babysitter – it is in defiance of the destructive forces just out of sight. Indeed, this violence is so routine, it has become easy to underplay. They give a distant bomb blast no more attention than if it were a peal of thunder, measuring its distance as others would guess the proximity of a storm, and when the security forces block the road, their main concern is whether it’ll stop their night out.
But the violence is insidious. Whether from the RUC, the IRA or an abusive husband, it lurks as a constant backdrop to their lives, eventually to erupt between them, tearing their supportive friendships apart.
The actors are as caustic and comfortable as close friends can be, if a little too polite to catch the full force of their hard-bitten humour. And despite the third-act revelations being straight out of Victorian melodrama, it remains an unsentimental portrait of women’s lives under psychological siege.
• At Citizens, Glasgow, until 10 February. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
