Forgotten women at heart of searing drama

Lifestyle – Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed shone a light on the dark secrets of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and has been staged all over the world since it premiered in Galway in 1992. It’s now on the Leaving Cert curriculum.  A 2020 production from the Mill Theatre is available online for audiences of all ages and its director Kate Canning tells JUDY MURPHY why Eclipsed is so important.

“I’d known this play since I was a teenager and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t done more,” says director Kate Canning about Patricia Burke Brogan’s groundbreaking play Eclipsed.

Eclipsed, which received its world premiere in the writer’s hometown of Galway in 1992, shone a light into the shameful story of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, doing so in a humane, sometimes humorous, ultimately devastating way.

Patricia, a former novice in the Mercy Order, who had spent a brief period supervising young women in Galway City’s Magdalen Laundry on Forster Street in the late 1950s, had been horrified by what she’d witnessed. With this play, she gave a voice to women who had been locked up in these institutions and largely forgotten. Unlike the Mother and Baby Homes, the women in laundries were incarcerated long-term, but it was all part of the same repressive society, where women who were perceived to have ‘brought shame’ on families were hidden.

The debut production of Eclipsed by Punchbag Theatre (in a former garage close to the Spanish Arch), went on to win a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 1992 and was subsequently staged all over the world. More recently, it’s been added to the Leaving Cert curriculum, which is one reason why Kate Canning decided to stage it at Dundrum’s Mill Theatre in Dublin last February.

A year later, it’s now available online, both for general audiences and exam students, with a special focus on the students.

Kate, who is originally from East Cork, first encountered Eclipsed as a teenager. She played the vulnerable Mandy, one of the ‘penitent’ women incarcerated in the laundry, in a production of the play from local theatre group, Ballyduff, an outfit renowned on Ireland’s amateur drama scene. Its powerful story resonated with her.

Most of the action in Eclipsed takes place in 1963, with the first and final scenes being set in 1992, the year it premiered. Rosa, a young woman who’d been adopted by a well-off American couple, is visiting the former St Paul’s laundry at Killmacha, seeking information about her birth-mother Brigit. She’s met by a vulnerable, elderly woman, Nellie-Nora, who guides her to a basement where a basket of old photos and letters remains.

As Rosa browses through these, the audience is transported back in time to meet the young Brigit and the other women in St Paul’s.

To create a play for an all-woman cast was almost unheard of when Patricia wrote Eclipsed and Kate marvels at her foresightedness.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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