Humanity and humour shine through in unflinching drama

REVIEW – Eclipsed – Mephisto Theatre Company

The power of humour and imagination to bring light into the most inhuman situations is demonstrated in Mephisto Theatre Company’s new production of Patricia Burke Brogan’s powerful play, Eclipsed.

Eclipsed, which is being staged at the city’s Town Hall Theatre gives audiences an insight into a world that existed in Ireland only a few decades ago, where women were locked away in Magdalen laundries and used as slave labour, under the supervision of celibate nuns, for the offence of being sexual beings.

The play, written by the former novice nun, was premiered in 1992 in Galway and went on to win a Fringe First award in Edinburgh. Following the recent McAleese Report into the Magdalen Laundries and the issue of compensation for former inmates, it’s an appropriate time for a revival.

Mephisto serves the play well, despite early problems with pacing on opening night. Once the actors found their rhythm, the play flowed superbly.

The action opens in 1992 in St Paul’s Laundry, Kilmacha, in the West of Ireland. Rosa, a young woman who was born out of marriage, then adopted and reared in America, has come here to learn about her background. Guided to the now defunct laundry area by elderly resident, Nellie-Nora, Rosa slowly realises that her own mother, Bridget had been a prisoner here – signed in by her family purely for the ‘crime’ of conceiving Rosa. As she searches for clues to Bridget’s life, the audience is transported to 1963, into the lives of these unmarried mothers and the nuns who supervised them.

Sr Virginia, a novice and new to the laundry, is horrified by life here – her Mother Superior, Mother Virginia has become institutionalised, somewhat like the ‘penitents’. As she observes, nobody else wants these women.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.