To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Northern Irish LGBTQ+ support organisation Cara-Friend, Kabosh theatre company is bringing the play Callings on tour across the UK and Ireland. Written by Dominic Montague, the drama is set in the charity’s offices on Belfast’s University Street five years after its helpline was set up in 1974.

The show originally premiered in 2022, with Montague telling GCN about why he was inspired to create it.

“I had written a play in 2019 called A Queer Céilí at the Marty Forsythe,” he began. “It’s based around the first international gay rights conference that happened in Belfast, and so as part of the research, I came across the story of Cara-Friend, and it just really captured my imagination and I knew that it needed its own story, or needed its own telling.”

Coincidentally, Dominic had volunteered for an emotional support helpline a few years prior to that, and so had first-hand experiences of what such services can offer people.

“Having been a listening volunteer myself, I had a bit of a shorthand for how transformational those moments can be, and how something that might seem quite small can change someone’s life. With Cara-Friend then, knowing the intimacy of those moments, I just thought it was a really important story that told us something new about that time, told us something new about the queer community in Belfast and in Northern Ireland.”

It was important for Dominic to note that these stories did expand beyond the capital city. “Queer people were everywhere,” he said. However, those living outside of an urban setting faced extreme isolation. “You may have thought that you were the only person on the face of the earth that had that feeling,” Dominic explained.

But with Cara-Friend, “All of a sudden you could pick up the phone and you could realise that you actually weren’t alone, and there were people out there who could understand that thing about you. So I think it was such a transformational thing.”

 

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In order to accurately retell this story, a lot of research was required. For Dominic, this included scouring the archives of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, as well as looking through newspapers from the time, both the mainstream ones and those created and circulated within the queer community.

Of course, he also engaged with a number of Cara-Friend’s founding members. 

“One of the things the play does is celebrate the volunteers. It’s centred on a number of characters, two of whom are volunteers. These people literally risked their lives – being queer certainly wasn’t safe, but they still made that effort to go out and to be there for people.

He added: “I love the fact that the people that set it up, I don’t think a lot of them would have described themselves as activists or as political. They would have seen themselves as ordinary people, but they were doing extraordinary things.” 

Dominic spoke in length to some of those who set up the organisation and gave decades of their lives to it.

“They were able to give me a feel of what it was like back in the early days and what the calls were like, what the emotions were like. Because Cara-Friend does have an extensive archive where they’ve kept documentation about every correspondence they’ve had.”

Interestingly, however, he did not want to see those correspondences for a very important reason.

“I was really mindful that I didn’t want to read them because I thought that even subconsciously, it might seep into the stories we were building,” he explained. “There’s a sacredness to those conversations that were undertaken in the spirit of privacy and confidentiality. I wanted to keep that sacredness there.”

Instead, Dominic spoke to the founders and some other long-term volunteers to learn about the main themes and feelings that came through from that time. He also looked at the annual reports instead of the logbooks to understand the data surrounding the correspondences, rather than the details of the actual conversations.

“It just felt like a more truthful way – to try and capture this part of the time instead of basing it on people’s actual calls.”

 

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While the play is set during the early years of Cara-Friend, Dominic feels that the story remains relevant to this day. Not only does Callings serve as a celebration of the organisation’s 50th anniversary, it is also a reminder that although the world has changed a lot, the LGBTQ+ community still struggles with many of the same issues; isolation, homophobia, oppression and more.

The writer also promises that the play is not bleak. “The one thing that people find quite surprising about the play is that it’s really full of humour, and it’s full of warmth, and there’s a love story at the heart of the play as well, several love stories at the heart of the play.

“One of the things I always do when I’m researching anything historical is ask the people who I’m talking to, ‘If there’s one thing about that time period, or one thing about this moment in time you would want our audience to know, what would it be?’ 

“The answer usually goes along the lines of, ‘It was dark, but also, we had the craic. We fell in love. We had life.’

“Some of the people who come into the show think it’ll be a certain thing – it’ll be sad, it’ll be angry, it’ll be x, y and z – and it’s all of those things, but it’s also passionate…Because that feels for me to be reflective of the time. People weren’t just fighting for the sake of it, they were fighting for joy and fighting for their right to experience joy and to live their lives.”

Callings is currently enjoying its 2024 tour across the UK and Ireland, and is due to take over Project Arts Centre in Dublin from November 6 to 9. Limited tickets remain, get yours before it’s too late!