IRELAND
Galway Advertiser
Ronnie O’Gorman Galway Advertiser, Thu, Jun 19, 2014
Most families, most adults, and most communities have secrets; past indiscretions they would rather forget about, and usually not very serious. But some of them can be very painful, and are kept hidden, in a sort of a Secrets Box, long after they need to be.
It took an artist like Patricia Burke Brogan, to prise open the heavy doors of the Magdalene Laundry, which had remained a sad, and neglected, community secret for generations. The marginalisation of unmarried mothers was so embedded in our psyche that we were afraid to look inside ourselves.
There were no whistleblowers in the Ireland of the early 1990s; yet Patricia deeply felt that the stories of the ‘Maggies’ had to be told. Not in a sensational headline-grabbing way, but in such a way that the lives of the women involved would be remembered as part of our shared humanity.*
Patricia, a former Mercy novice, who had worked as a supervisor in the laundry, originally wrote the story as a one-act play. Single-mothers, Cathy, Brigit, Mandy and Nellie-Nora, whose children are either dead, or have been taken away for adoption, or were enclosed in orphanages, were condemned to work in humiliating conditions in a laundry. The women are ‘disgraced and forgotten’ by the community outside the gates; while their lovers, the fathers of their children, are not held responsible. Having read the play, Fintan O’Toole, the literary editor and drama critic with The Irish Times, encouraged Patricia to enlarge the story into a full-length play, and send it to Irish theatre companies for production.
After several rejections, Punchbag Theatre Company, agreed to do it. Eclipsed opened in a converted garage near the Spanish Arch, on St Valentine’s Day, February 14 1992 (the irony of the date was not lost on Patricia). It was an immediate success. ** There were some objections, which probably helped its promotion. One evening people stood outside the theatre objecting that nuns were depicted in a bad light. Yet the crowds kept coming. People openly wept in the audience. It went on tour of Irish theatres receiving excellent reviews. But when Punchbag took the play to the Edinburgh Theatre festival, and it won the major Fringe award, it attracted the mother and father of all the publicity that you can imagine.
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