Moving play Eclipsed retains the power to stir audiences

A story of human resilience and resistance, more than one of oppression is how director Niall Cleary describes Patricia Burke Brogan’s groundbreaking play, Eclipsed.

The play, which played a major role in exposing the shameful history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, opens this week in the Town Hall Theatre, in a new production from local company, Mephisto Theatre.

It’s been 21 years since Eclipsed, written by the former Mercy novice, was premiered by Punchbag Theatre in Galway. Since then, it has been translated into many languages and has had at least 60 productions all over the world, including in North America, Germany, France, Germany and Italy.

Here in Ireland, the Magdalen Laundry issue has been put back in the spotlight in recent months, with the publication of the McAleese Report on the laundries in February, and the thorny issue of financial compensation for the women.

“It is still time to reflect on it while it is unresolved,” Niall feels, and Eclipsed offers a perfect way of doing that. It represents “a different way to have a conversation about the laundries”, and gives people an opportunity to listen to the stories of the women who were institutionalised, he adds.

“They were real women in these places. The characters in Eclipsed are fictional, but they represent real stories and Patricia was an insider in the laundry so this play comes from a very heart-felt place.”

While Eclipsed is heavy in parts, it’s also uplifting and it’s not a heavy night of theatre, Niall says.

“You think of a place like that and the misery of it, but Patricia captured the women’s imagination and their fight to survive.  Some of the women have been institutionalised and some are fighting like lionesses to see their children. There isn’t a ‘type’ of person in there. They are all doing what they can to survive.”

And it’s not just the unfortunate inmates who face that struggle.

Sr Virginia, the young nun in Eclipsed, is “Pat’s voice in a way”, Niall says. “She had entered the convent to work for the poor and care for people and then found herself in the role of oppressor.”

While the unwilling inmates are the real heroines of Eclipsed, the play is so well written that even the older, more forbidding figure of Mother Victoria evokes sympathy, he observes. “She is as much institutionalised as any of the women, or maybe even more. Everyone here is damaged and they are not stereotypes of goodies or baddies.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.