Frank McGuinness and his first play The Factory Girls is set for Cork

Renowned playwright Frank McGuinness talks to Colette Sheridan as his very first play is set to grace the Everyman stage this month

WIDELY regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest living playwrights, Frank McGuinness feels that his 1982 debut play, The Factory Girls, which is coming to Cork’s Everyman, is still relevant. “We’re not exactly out of recession now,” says McGuinness. Set during recessionary times, with industrial unrest at the core of the play, “it shows that you need to be able to stand on your own feet and take on whatever confronts you. Sometimes, you’d be as confronted from within as much as from without.”

The play, set in a shirt factory in Donegal, was inspired by McGuinness’s mother, aunts, and grandmother who all worked in a shirt factory in Buncrana, Co Donegal. “I grew up with a very powerful mother, listening to her stories about what happened in the factory. Looking back on it, it was probably inevitable that The Factory Girls would be my first play. The women working (in the factory) were extraordinarily skilled. They had their own language in which they talked about work and had a strong sense of communal identity as workers. They were protective of each other. The strength of that bond was important to me and it gave me a sense of what working life was like. I think they were very glad that they had jobs because it was very tight times. They weren’t particularly well treated. There was a desire for some form of change and for some kind of recognition that what they did was worthwhile.”