A play on how a friendship fractures

The dynamics of a friendship between two young women is explored in Katie Mag, which opens at the Everyman Theatre on Apr 9.

Produced by Cork theatre company, Roundhouse Production, and written and directed by Corkwoman, Jennifer Rogers, the play has toured in the UK and Ireland. It stars Kelly McAuley and Amy O’Dwyer.

Rogers and Rachel Yoder, graduates of theatre and drama studies at UCC, set up their company in 2009 to develop new Irish writing and original, devised work. Katie Mag was a one-woman show called Magazine, and explored female friendship and how women’s lives are influenced by magazines. It was developed at the TDC (Theatre Development Centre), at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. It was performed as a reading in Smock Alley, Dublin, last year.

Rogers and her collaborators decided to turn it into a two-hander. “That made the story between the two women very strong. Their relationship is central to the tension, and dramatic structure, of the play. We’ve also maintained a lot of the original ideas we had about girls finding their identity, and attempting to find it through the media and magazines. There’s Katie, and then there’s Mags, who plays several characters,” she says.

Initially, Katie is the odd one out and a loner, until she meets Mags. Katie becomes addicted to Mags’s ambition. The two move to London after college. There, Katie’s career takes off. She gets a job as a fashion editor with a magazine. But Mags isn’t as lucky.

“The play is about how the friendship between the two fractures and how Katie’s reality and Mags’s reality start to drift apart. Katie has found her purpose, which gives her confidence. External factors also affect the friendship. Without giving too much away about the plot, there’s a kind of split,” Rogers says. As a fashion editor, Katie has a public role. “She’s ‘on’ all the time. Her personal life gets pushed aside. The play looks at that idea and how Katie relates to herself and to Mags.”

Drawing on her own experience of female friendships, Rogers says that a boyfriend can often result in the single friend being cast aside. “There is betrayal and hurt. Mags experiences that when Katie starts a relationship with a guy. Mags generally feels pushed away. She has brought Katie to a certain level, but Katie doesn’t need her anymore.”

Rogers lived in London. She is intrigued by the idea that external tension can create responses, such as panic.

Over a six-week period in London, at the time of the Kings Cross bombing in 2005, Rogers had a series of panic attacks on the Tube. “It was really hot and there was tension everywhere. It happened a few times. It was a huge part of my decision to come home,” she says.

Roundhouse has produced a number of original plays, including Lipstick, and Spitting Love, which went to the Edinburgh Festival in 2010.

“That was a tough learning curve, but we got good audiences towards the end and we won an award,” she says.

As well as devising new work, Roundhouse are considering producing adaptations. “There’s a sense that we’re working with great artists. I think there’s definitely room for us in Cork. But, as much as we want to work in Cork, we also like working in Dublin and away from Ireland.

“We do some work with the community in Cork, which involves working with African women living here. We also run workshops and classes for young people in schools,” says Rogers.