Owen McCafferty
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Owen McCafferty (born 1961) is a playwright from Northern Ireland. After several jobs including tiling, and working in an abattoir, he became a full-time writer. His plays include Mojo Mickeybo, which focuses on two boys growing up in Belfast in the 1970s whose friendship is ripped apart by sectarian politics. This has been adopted for the cinema in a film called Mickeybo and Me starring Julie Walters and Adrian Dunbar. Freefalling deals with a man and a woman who turn to violence in an effort to escape the emptiness of their lives (both Kabosh Theatre, Belfast) Shoot the Crow, a comedy about four tilers planning a small-scale heist (Druid Theatre, Galway and Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester), which will open in London's West End in autumn 2005. The production will feature an all-star cast. 'Closing Time', an O'Neill-like drama set in a rundown Belfast pub and his epic, day-in-the-life of a city playScenes from the Big Picture (Royal National Theatre, London) which was described in a review in the Financial Times as "more or less the perfect play". McCafferty received the top three awards for this brilliant portrait of Belfast: the John Whiting Award for new theatre writing, Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for new playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth award for best new play. This is the first time that any playwright has won all three awards in one year. The play has been performed in the USA and Republic of Macedonia.
"You’ll find everything here, from gut wrenching grief to cackling joy.” Time Out London
“McCafferty’s writing is wonderfully attentive to the beauty of the real world – the mundane and common place has a poetic elegance which he draws with stunning accuracy and every one of the diverse characters is fully and neatly formed.” London Theatre Guide
He was described as “the Northern star which is shining most brightly at the moment” (Belfast Telegraph). "IT IS VIRTUALLY impossible nowadays to talk about theatre in London without mentioning Owen McCafferty’s name." screamed a headline in the Irish World. Even in "his own land" he is proclaimed and revered which is not always the case especially for writers who like McCafferty shun the 'usual' subjects.
His most recent play is an adaptation of J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London in 2005. The adaption while using the skeleton of the original bristled with McCafferty's usual dramatic energy and original language.
All of McCafferty's plays show a truly original grasp of language and the complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. The first playwright to really create an authentic poetry out of the Belfast dialect to rival that of O'Casey and Synge. Like Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized and his vocabulary burst with strange compounds and coined words yet the sense of what is being said is never lost. It is his lyricism which carries the audience with him and which makes witnessing a performance of one of his plays so haunting. He is the first truly great playwright of Northern Ireland to go beyond the clichés of political writing to document the lives of ordinary men and women of his native town.
