When the Ryan report on child abuse in Catholic-run institutions was published last year, the Abbey Theatre’s director Fiach Mac Chongail and literary director Aideen Howard began discussing the idea of the theatre responding. They considered having the entire 2,700 pages of the report read publicly, but eventually settled on a short series, entitled The Darkest Corner, comprising Gerard Mannix Flynn’s one-man show James X; a reading of The Evidence I Shall Give, a 1961 courtroom drama mentioned in the Ryan report and centering on the transfer of a 13-year-old girl to an industrial school; and No Escape, the theatre’s first piece of verbatim theatre, edited from the report by journalist Mary Raftery.
“The Abbey Theatre wants to to bear witness and keep the report alive in the minds of people,” says Mac Chongail. “Time and memory could diminish what a catastrophe this was, as a theatre but we have a responsibility, as do other sectors of society, to avoid amnesia.”
Documentary theatre has the benefit of immediacy. The usual long process of distilling a dramatic response can be circumvented, while still resulting in a different kind of engagement. “Art exists that we may recover the sensations of life,” wrote Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, and with No Escape, the audience, Mac Chongail promises, will get in touch with the anger that greeted the report last year: “It’s dark – you leave thinking of how the State were so culpable, so angry. We need always to be in that national conversation, that’s why the Abbey was founded. If we absconded from that we wouldn’t be dong justice to the founders of the theatre.”
Since her documentary 11 years ago, States of Fear, Mary Raftery has been to the forefront in exposing the shocking dereliction of duty by the Irish State to its weakest citizens, and the depravity and extent of appalling abuse in the Catholic Church. Her aim, she says, is to give a different least of life to the report. “The big fear is that it’s a one-day wonder in the media . . . it does get confined to a shelf and gather dust even with the best will in the world.” Raftery credits “a fabulous cast” (Jane Brennan, Lorcan Cranitch, Michele Forbes, Eamonn Hunt, Eleanor Methven, Donal O’Kelly and Jonathan White) and director Roisin McBrinn for creating something “far more visceral” than reading the report in the page. “Every word is in the report. It’s animating it you hear the voices, get that much closer to reality of the sheer awfulness of it. It opens up all those questions all over again: how did we as a society decide to let this happen? People knew these places were awful. We must continuously reflect on how a society can allow this and regularly go into denial about it. We still neglect kids in care, but in a slightly different way. We continue to be incredibly dysfunctional in that area, and it’s not surprising given where we come from.”
When the report first emerged, Raftery was in journalist mode: “You have to digest it incredibly quickly and come to opinion about it. It’s really rapid process and intensive.” Revisiting the report for No Escape was a different matter. “It was extraordinary reading it again. It’s an amazing piece of work, so multilayered, so complex. He didn’t just identity the abuse and the who, what and when He tried to give a sense of the individual players, the nuns and brothers. We’ve never heard those voices, we’ve gotten weak defence and denial but what a number did in Ryan was stop denying.
“The good fortune was that I did know the territory, that I was able to identify what the layers were. Always the voice of the survivors is critical but the Department of Education and the State, not just the religious orders, were grotesque in their negligence. The trick was the balance all that. I’m really glad I did that. I digested it at much more profound way han the instant response.”
When you are dealing with the fact that 170,000 children were abused by hundreds of brothers, nuns and priests, one thing is clear for Raftery: there can be no moving on. “That notion of ‘that’s all in the past’ is kind of similar to the arguing that Germany should move on from the Nazi era, but these things do happen again. A week or two of publicity doesn’t shift that pattern of denial. It will happen again in the same way unless rigorous protections are in place. The default situation is that the powerless are victimised within systems designed to do the opposite. We are slowly waking up to this. We stand condemned as a society that has this ability and desire to go into denial. We can be cruel and turn our heads from cruelty. Only by that awareness can we make an effort not to do it again. The lessons from our shocking complacency is a continual process. It’s never over.”
No Escape opens at the Abbey Theatre on on Wednesday; The Evidence I Shall Give is on April 26th James X runs from April 29-May 1. See abbeytheatre.ie
