'Since I came out, the world has changed': Playwright draws on own experience as a gay Traveller
Oein De Bhairdúin.
A play about a gay Traveller woman is one of the contributions to the Last Sunday Live event, an online incarnation of the annual Fit-Up Festival in Co Cork. Oein De Bhairdúin has co-written Seen A Hare, with Emma O'Grady, which tells of a young Traveller woman who comes out to her father.
The play is inspired by the writer's own family folklore. De Bhairdúin is a Traveller himself, and his granduncle was known as 'Jack the Hare', so-called because of an incident in the 1960s when he was in his thirties. A hound was chasing a hare. Jack pursued the animals into a bush. He became convinced that the hare had transformed into a woman. This is a recurring motif in Irish mythology that, he says, represents the challenging of social norms. Uncle Jack ended up being sectioned and spent ten years in a psychiatric hospital.
