Revisiting the Troubles in 1990s Belfast, Sapling is the result of intensive research in the city. And winning the Women’s prize, says Duncan, ‘is the maddest thing that’s ever happened to me’
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t took Georgina Duncan a few seconds to realise that Indhu Rubasingham, when announcing the winner of the Women’s prize for playwriting last week, was talking about her drama, Sapling. The 30-year-old recalls the moment: “The first sentence I heard her say, I was like, ‘That could be any of the plays.’ Then I was like, ‘Holy shit! This is the maddest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
The news still hasn’t fully sunk in, but anyone who has read Sapling will not be surprised by Duncan’s victory. Set in Belfast in the 1990s, the play follows 16-year-old Gerry, whose older brother Connor was murdered 10 years earlier by another child. “Someone described it as being about the scar tissue behind grief, which I thought was so eloquent,” Duncan says. The play was born out of her own fear of loss: “Grief is something we all experience in our lives. And it frightens me.”
Duncan admits she didn’t know much about the Troubles before she began writing Sapling but , determined to make the play “right”, she took prison tours in Belfast, and rode in the back of a black cab with a driver named Cedric to absorb the city’s history and geography, while also meeting Northern Irish actors to talk through her ideas. “I paid them with a pint and a bowl of chips.”
