WEST Belfast actor Terence Keeley is looking forward to stepping onto the Lyric Theatre stage this month to reprise his role as James in the eagerly anticipated Project Children. Last August the former Derry Girls actor took on the role as the play debuted during Féile an Phobail at St Comgall’s on Divis Street. The reaction to the play – which is written by fellow Lenadoonian Fionnuala Kennedy and directed by Brassneck’s Tony Devlin – was “ridiculous,” he says. “You couldn’t get a ticket by the end of the run.” Part of the play's success, he believes, is that so many children took part in the original Project Children, availing of six weeks respite in the United States each summer during the Troubles. “It’s a story that a lot of people can relate to,” he adds. Terence plays James who went to the States in 1998, soon after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. “His sisters had gone to New Jersey and New York but his cousin went to Montana and he told him all these stories about the Rocky Mountains and about mountain lions everywhere and he became obsessed with this and when he got to go on Project Children he said that he wanted to go to Montana because of the mountain lions but his cousin was only winding him up,” laughs Terence. “Throughout the play there are different stories from different years going back from the 1970s. “With my character – because of the time of the Good Friday Agreement – I think that maybe there was more optimism and hope and so he’s a wee lad from West Belfast who has all this excitement about going to America, and it’s a really uplifting story. And then there is the relationship that he has with his American family, Jack and Bridget, where he went out to about five or six times and could have settled there – like a lot of kids did – and he thought he would have, but he ended up becoming a community activist in Belfast because he wanted to make Belfast a better place because of the experiences that he had out there which broadened his horizons.”
