Staging story of US woman who chronicled Famine

The life and writings of Asenath Nicholson, a US woman who documented the Famine, has been dramatised for Rua Breathnach’s latest play, Welcome to the Stranger, writes Ellie O’Byrne.

She travelled to all but one county in Ireland at the height of the Famine and penned two exposés of the plight of the impoverished people she met, leaving behind her one of the most extensive primary source accounts of the Irish famine.