Belfast Blues

Passionate, riveting, and often humorous, Belfast Blues is a tapestry of autobiographical stories told from Hughes’ perspective as a little girl coming of age in the war-torn Belfast of the 1980s. These stories bear insightful witness to the many faces of “trying to live a normal life” amidst the violence born of the longstanding conflict between Catholics and Protestants. At thirteen, Hughes temporarily left “The Troubles” to star in a TV movie, Children in the Crossfire, directed by George Schaefer, only to return home to a different kind of confusion and pain.

Belfast Blues, a play written and performed by Geraldine Hughes, was developed in collaboration with Kim Terrell and The Virtual Theatre Project in 2003, and produced by Steven Klein and Matt Shakman, as the first play in Black Dahlia’s 2003 season in Los Angeles. It was originally directed by Charles Haid, with set design by Jonathan Christman and sound design by Jonathan Snipes. Its New York premiere took place at the Culture Project in 2005 under the direction of Carol Kane.

In 2019, after over fifteen years of touring Belfast Blues to worldwide acclaim, Hughes staged her final performances of Belfast Blues produced by herself and Brassneck Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast as part of West Belfast’s Féile an Phobail. Irish Repertory Theatre is proud to open its digital fall season with the never-before-seen video of those final performances of this powerful autobiographical play.