Rona Munro’s BOLD GIRLS
Gillian Sargent
Published in: Paperback
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2021
Price: £6.95
ISBN 9781906841478
Click here to watch Gillian Sargent’s talk on Bold Girls plus other videos from the 2019 ASLS Schools Conference, and here for the ASL Teaching Notes, including the National 5 Teaching Note for Bold Girls.
Rona Munro’s 1991 play Bold Girls is a tale of four Belfast women during the Troubles, exploring personal and communal history, and what it means when aspects of a community – ideologies, relationships, and spaces, for example – are threatened.
Despite being set in a very specific time and place, the themes are universal: how societies are warped by male violence, dominance, and social privilege, and female subservience to that behaviour. Bold Girls is a case-study of the victims – rather than the perpetrators – of conflict: an unsentimental portrait of women’s lives under psychological siege. Gillian Sargent’s Scotnote Study Guide provides a comprehensive overview to the characters and themes of Munro’s play, as well as its artistic and cultural influences, and is an excellent guide for senior school pupils and teachers alike.