The Marian Hotel – so much was unspoken, so much was suspected but not shared (Sole Purpose Productions at the Lyric Theatre)

Caitriona Cunningham’s play begins with the residents of the Marianvale Mother and Baby Home entering the set in shadow. It’s an appropriate visual metaphor for what is to come over the next few months of their lives, events and actions that will cast a shadow over the years and decades to come.

Kitty is from Derry, but she’s going to spend the next few months confined in the home in Newry. She’s introduced to life in the home by Sister Celeste (Maureen Wilkinson), a no-nonsense, standoffish nun, who gives a cursory explanation of the expected routine, before handing the 19-year-old off to existing residents to fill her in on the detail of what’s expected. The quieter Sister Rosanne (Maeve Connelly) stands to one side, distant but showing signs of actual humanity.

The notion of secrecy – not using their real first names and not discussing family details – is stressed from the start. Phone calls from the outside are allowed but discouraged. The idea that “we’re not in jail you know” does little to dispel the feeling that the young women have lost all control of their destiny: they’re now slaves to the home, expected to work in the laundry and follow the rules. It’s spartan: this is no hotel. There are no prenatal classes or preparation. And the only medication handed out is to make the women sleep at night and cause no trouble.

Aoibh Johnson gives Kitty a youthful optimism that never lapses into total naivety. She’s playing a version of the playwright who gave birth to her daughter in the home. Feisty Sarah (Shannon Wilkinson) sees herself fighting for Irish freedom: yet she’s been trapped by the church, the state and society. She wails with pain when she realises her newborn child has been removed without her knowledge or permission. Roma Harvey’s Sinead is a young widow. Now that she is pregnant again, she’s condemned as an unmarried mother who is beyond help and worthy of being shamed. Caroline (Una Morrison) is serious and fervent, almost modelled on wee Clare in Derry Girls. Multi-generational trauma is examined through a parallel story line featuring Jackie (Sorcha Shanahan) who is trying to find her birth mother.

The absence of men on set is startling, reinforcing how there were few to no consequences for the men involved in the babymaking, while the women were shamed, isolated, confined and then robbed of their offspring. Somehow these women are covering up other people’s sins, and being (further) abused in the process.

So much was unspoken. So much was suspected but not shared.

After a slightly unsteady and limbering start, the jigsaw pieces begin to fall into place firmly with the arrival of young pregnant Ellen. She’s not even a teenager. It’s the first moment when the characters step outside their own misery and the scales lift from their eyes. How is she pregnant? And why is someone so young being sent to live here? Rachel Harley injects Ellen with a tangible vulnerability and it’s distressing to realise that her character might be running back into the hands of an abuser. For all Caroline’s uptight manner, she’s the one that gets closest to befriending Ellen, with Una Morrison taking her character on a lovely journey of change.

Robert Attewell’s spartan set serves the touring production well. Two long wooden benches are shifted around the stage by the cast, and even stood up on their ends, to give shape to bedrooms, sitting rooms and a hospital ward. The scene changes are a physical task that echoes their work in the laundry and the lack of concern for the pregnant women.

One character proclaims with hope: “and then we have the whole of our lives in front of us”. But the final what-happens-next scene is beyond heartbreaking.

The Marian Hotel was produced by Sole Purpose Productions and produced and directed by Patricia Byrne. The play together with the associated exhibitions and talks have shone a light and opened up conversations on a shameful period of Irish social history. Hopefully they will form a line in the sand that will never be reached.

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