It has been harrowing to rehearse, and will be hard to watch, but the Abbey's 'documentary theatre' piece based on the Ryan report is a cultural response to a national trauma, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
“Please note that the content of No Escape is disturbing. Over 16s only. Parental guidance necessary.”
THE WORDS ABOVE are how the Abbey Theatre warns its audience about the first piece of “documentary theatre” it has ever staged. The mental health advisory is one usually associated with cinema, TV and the internet.
No Escapeisn't a play in the traditional sense. It is an orchestrated reading by actors of the Ryan report, the investigation by Mr Justice Sean Ryan into abuse in Catholic-run industrial schools and institutions. The script was compiled and edited by journalist and TV director Mary Raftery, whose task it was to distil 2,700 pages of the Ryan report into a little more than 50 pages. Her goal was "to give a visceral sense of how the system broke children".
The script is so harrowing that psychological counselling has been offered to the actors and the Abbey Theatre’s front-of-house staff have been given helpline numbers and advised on how to handle distressed audience members. It will be an intense 90-minute production, with no intermission. “It’s not going to be a fun night out at the theatre,” says Raftery.
When the Ryan report into abuse in the Artane, Letterfrack and Goldenbridge industrial schools was published in May 2009 – nearly a year ago – Abbey literary director Aideen Howard and artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail wanted to respond and ensure that the Abbey was “involved in the national conversation”, as Mac Conghail puts it.
He and Howard thought of bringing in a playwright, but that would have taken too long from commission to production of a script. The way to put the Ryan report on stage relatively quickly, they decided, was to emulate the process of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London, which pioneered documentary theatre with its read-aloud verbatim account of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday and its testimonies of survivors of Guantánamo. No playwright could possibly do better than the words of the people who had experienced the events.
The Abbey was less concerned with the issue of who, in these depressing times, would buy tickets for an unsettling evening of theatre concerning events that started in 1930, a very long ago time ago in the context of today’s Twitterati. Howard and Mac Conghail believed that, as custodians of the theatre’s traditions, they needed to take the report a step further and give it the sort of understanding and meaning that only the theatre can achieve.
Mac Conghail says: “You can ask: is this box office? I don’t care. We have a responsibility to present this work. It’s going to be tough for people, and not a night of entertainment.”
As playwright Sean O'Casey wrote in The Plough and the Stars, premiered at the Abbey in 1923 and to be staged there once again later this year: "The time is rotten ripe for revolution."
The value of presenting the Ryan report on the stage, says Howard , is that it will be “a communal experience” and an opportunity to “bear witness”, compared to the solitary reading of a report in the newspaper or on the internet.
Howard and Mac Conghail have a strong stable of 20 playwrights currently commissioned, but instead they approached dogged working journalist Mary Raftery, who for 12 years has followed the story of institutional abuse and without whom the Ryan report may never have happened.
“She’s quite an extraordinary, unique person,” says Mac Conghail.
As the maker of the ground-breaking TV documentary, States of Fear, and the author of the book, Suffer the Little Children, Raftery grasped the challenge. She was already aware that, without some cultural statement, the Ryan report would "disappear in a puff of smoke" and be forgotten.
After a month’s preparation, she wrote the bulk of the script at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, in an intensive two weeks, followed by a further month of editing. While at Annaghmakerrig, she found herself apologising to resident artists during communal meals for being “increasingly morose” as she waded through the report. She hadn’t expected to be so emotionally affected by her close reading, even though more than anyone she knew the material: “It was an extraordinary revelation.”
She praises Mr Justice Ryan: “I didn’t realise just how good the report was, the complexity of it, the way Ryan reflected not just the voices of the abused but also the voices of the people who worked in the system – the abusers – reaching a level of truth that was not available before. He conveyed a real sense of how complex the world of the institutions was. It was not a simple world. It was grossly and grotesquely abusive.” The reading was agony, but worthwhile in the end, like jumping into the freezing sea on a warm day. “You just have to do it,” Raftery says.
The cast have had a similar experience, plunging into No Escapewith a mere three-week rehearsal period. Lorcan Cranitch, who will speak the words of Mr Justice Ryan, explains that the actors won't be developing characters as they do in traditional theatre.
“I’M A MOUTHPIECE for the Ryan report and I’ll be making no attempt at becoming judicial,” he says. “The main challenge for us in presenting a factual document is what slant do you put on it, if you put a slant on it at all. It’s a fascinating place to be . . . The project is provocative, and I’m attracted to theatre that is provocative. There was also the opportunity to work with Róisín McBrinn, a very exciting director, and to be part of something that is ingrained in our psyche as a nation.”
Researching his part before rehearsals, Cranitch began reading the Ryan report in depth. “Very quickly I had to stop. I thought, I’m going to get in deeper than I need to be . . . I don’t think people realise exactly how horrific the report is.”
The account of a two-and-a-half-year-old being beaten stopped him in his tracks. For the actors, “it has taken its toll”, Cranitch adds, though he himself hasn’t availed of the counselling offered.
Choosing the most powerful pieces of testimony, while also linking them together in a way that told a story, was a challenge, says Raftery. "The audience will not be bored; they will be energised," she says. "It's a play in the sense that States of Fearwas a documentary. I have taken that TV experience and translated in on to the stage."
Who will want to see this work of theatre? Raftery sees her audience as the sort of people who used to read Magillmagazine, where writers such as herself pulled together all the strands of an issue and produced what she calls "the definitive word". She also expects that there will be people in their 50s, many of whom are among the 1,700 people who volunteered evidence to the Ryan report (300 were eventually chosen and quoted by Ryan). She thinks the play is also relevant to the children and friends of those who survived the industrial schools. As for the relatively privileged younger generation, she hopes that many will buy tickets out of a need to understand the trauma Irish society is still recovering from.
“From 1930, 170,000 people went through the institutional system, in which all kinds of abuse was endemic,” she says. “That’s numbing – it’s the equivalent of crimes against humanity during the second World War.”
Raftery explains her own resilience in the face of such horrific material, saying that she herself had a “middle-class, privileged childhood with no trauma of any kind” in the “intensive eccentricity” of Dublin 4, attending the Pembroke School, formerly known as “Miss Meredith’s”. She thinks that her protected childhood gave her strength.
“I have often thought I could never do what a counsellor does. I’d have difficulty absorbing pain at that level,” she says. “But I was driven to express the injustice of what happened to other people . . . As a journalist, you follow the story. If you are lucky enough to come across a story that will make a difference, you have a duty to follow it to the ends of the earth.”
“Raftery is so self-effacing,” concludes Lorcan Cranitch, “but in lots of ways she’s the heroine of the piece.”
No Escapepreviews on Tue, April 13, opens on Wed, April 14, and runs until Sat, April 24. For more, see abbeytheatre.ie
