Jo Egan’s death, aged 62, on Christmas Eve last, in a car accident in Co Wicklow, sent shock waves through Irish theatre, and community-based arts bodies here. The widespread dismay was testimony to the almost unique range of her achievements in the arts in Ireland, north and south, from the humblest suburban voluntary groups right up to the Abbey Theatre, where actor Marty Rea delivered an encomium to mark her passing, from the main stage.
Egan, born on October 5th, 1960, had an unconventional introduction to the theatre in her late twenties. Egan was busy until then raising her four daughters in Baldoyle, Co Dublin, to the eldest of whom, Sinead, she had given birth aged just 16, and single, while still a schoolgirl.
In the Ireland of the 1970s such an event was still shocking, especially for a young woman from a respectable, conventional middle-class family; her father, Paddy Egan, was a quantity surveyor and builder, originally from Swinford, Co Mayo, who lectured at Bolton Street College of Technology, Dublin, and her mother, Ellen (Nellie) (née Gillespie), originally from Galway, a homemaker with five other children.
When her daughter Rachel was born two years later, Egan was living in the mother-and-baby home in Bessborough, Co Cork, and that experience may well have informed a characteristic of her later work in theatre, her very strong commitment to feminism and to working with women’s groups both in Dublin and in Belfast.
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The first of these was KLEAR, a community arts group in Kilbarrack, north Dublin. It had grown partly out of a drama group in Howth and put on productions in local hotels and pubs. The first of these to involve Egan, who wrote the script in co-operation with the cast, was The Tupperware Party, described by one of her friends in KLEAR, Roisin Moran, as a combination of “Mass, mass hysteria and crazy science fiction”. Other productions, plays written by Egan but always working co-operatively with the group, followed, including Voyage of Discovery.
The group spread its wings around Dublin, working with community groups in the Liberties, Rialto and Finglas and at the City Arts Centre. Moran stressed that Egan’s dynamism was crucial to the process: “Jo made the plays, found the gigs, groups and venues, and made it all seem effortless.”
After her move to Belfast, Egan’s work took on a new, and ground-breaking dimension with a project called The Wedding Community Play, written by Belfast playwrights Marie Jones and Martin Lynch, with the company, to a concept provided by Egan, and directed by her for the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University in 1999.
Egan became an important producer and facilitator of theatre in Belfast, working with Gerri Moriarty, a community artist and arts consultant, to teach community and education workers in Belfast for the city’s Community Arts Forum.
Egan deepened her work across the North’s religious divide in two of her most important later works, Ritual of Life (2010), commissioned by Castlereagh Council, which involved interviews with older women from the area’s working-class Protestant community, and Crimea Square, a remarkable re-creation on stage of life in Belfast’s Shankill Road from the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912 to the Shankill Road bombing in 1993. This play, drawn partly from oral archive material and using both professional and amateur actors, and written collaboratively with Sally Cochran, John Dougan, Albert Haslett and Jacqueline Nicholson, won the Belfast Telegraph Audience Award in 2013.
The mistreatment of women is a theme of at least three of Egan’s plays, Madame Geneva, (2017), Body Politics (2021), The Agent and the Linen Workers (2011) and her film script, Lisa’s Story, Reach Out (2010).
A singularly important later work was The Crack in Everything (2015), commissioned from Macha by Derry Playhouse, based again on true-life situations across the community divide, on the theme of six families who all lost children to the Troubles. An edited version was performed before MPs in London last year.
At the time of her death, Egan was under commission from the Abbey Theatre for a full-length play, Coldharbour Lane, on a theme of Irish emigration to London.
Jo Egan is survived by her daughters Sinead, Rachel, Kitty and Antonia, and by her sisters Patsy (O’Sullivan) and Maggie (Shinkwin), and her brothers Charlie Dillon and Julian Egan. Her sister Moya predeceased her in 2012.