GALLERY: Award-winning play inspires audiences in Coalisland

SIX workers fighting to save a women’s hostel from closure was the empowering theme of a recent hard-hitting, yet moving, play performed at Craic Theatre, Coalisland on Friday night.

Defiantly titled ‘Not One Our Watch’ and performed by Kabosh Theatre Company, local audiences were treated to the smash-hit show which featured a small cast of three members: Rachel McCabe of Antrim, Catriona McFeely of Derry and Colette Lennon-Dougal of Belfast.

The popular play, which was crowned winner of the 2024 ‘Aisling Culture Award’, marked Kabosh’s only performance in Tyrone during the group’s October tour across the North and South of Ireland.

Written by Louise Matthews and directed by Paula McFetridge, the plot transported the Tyrone crowd back to Belfast 2022, when the North’s only women’s hostel, Regina Coeli House in Belfast, is threatened with closure.

As such, six determined workers rise together to fight against a failing system and an uncaring establishment.

For 12 weeks they live, work, and breathe resistance.

Standing up to a management structure refusing to find solutions; standing up for the women they protect; standing up for essential services… and standing up to shout: ‘Not on our watch!’

A spokesperson for ‘Not On My Watch’ said that the show was a ‘powerful and moving’ reminder that activism and community matters.

They added, “Kabosh produces provocative theatre that transforms our understanding of who and where we are, through giving voice to site, space and people.”

Kabosh is a core-funded client of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council. ‘Not On Our Watch’ was supported by Unite the Union, a democratic and campaigning union which fights back for employees in the workplace; protects worker’s rights and takes trade unionism out to millions of unorganised workers.