Eclipsed: The Story

About the Play

Four by Two. Four women locked up by two women. An eclipsed world, intruded on by two further women. Of course it is an Irish play, so it includes the usual sermon on the church, but it does skip the "troubles" (phew). Yet, there is trouble and the all-woman-cast hints at it: the early Irish feminism of the sixties, and poor oppressed penitent mothers with children born out of wedlock. There is no happy ending either.

Sounds stereotypical? It isn't, because Eclipsed subverts these well-known Irish plots and themes and tiresome feminist tirades by presenting them with a sheen of absurdity. The strength of this sketch with its eight strange characters, skilfully set in the eclipsed 60's Catholic church state-of-mind, is not so much the quality of its message, but its bubbling dramatic form .

"Eclipsed" made its first official appearance at a reading in Galway in 1988, and was first performed (again in Galway) in 1992. The piece deals with a subject which has since made it into the mainstream media and has resulted in heated debate, involving lay-people from all walks of life and the Catholic church. The piece is notable, not because it offers any solution (it doesn't), but because Patricia Burke Brogan (the author) was among the first to tackle this tricky topic: The illegal dealing in babies by the Catholic church in the 50s and 60s.

Eclipsed deals with penitential-home laundries attached to some Irish convents, where, from the time of the potato famine to the early nineteen-seventies, mothers were locked away, often for a lifetime, to cleanse their terrible sin of having become pregnant outside wedlock. For these young girls and women, the laundries were at once their refuge and their prison. Separated from their children, they lived a spartan and loveless existence.

The major part of the two acts of "Eclipsed" takes place in a cloister in Galway in the 1960s, among fallen women who are allowed to live their unworthy lives, separated completely from their illegitimate children, working in the laundry. The framework for the piece is provided by a result of this treatment in the present day: a woman, sent to America as an orphan, who has returned to the cloister (now closed) to search for traces of her mother.

"Eclipsed" concentrates on the lives of the "imprisoned" women, their struggle for a little freedom, and their longing to see their children again. It is in the very nature of the story that the Catholic church does not come out of it well. But what is interesting are the scenes, alternating between the chapel and the steam of the laundry, where the mothers emerge as rather less than the ideal of mature womanhood. The characters are consciously constructed to be two-dimensional, and combine to make a picture of women kept immature by the spoon-feeding of the church, as often seems to have been the case in Irish society in the 60s. It is in this atmosphere that Brigit, bitter and joyless, Mandy, immature and infatuated with Elvis, Nellie-Nora, naïve and nervous, and Cathy, strangled by asthma and a broken heart, unite to confront the diabolical principal of the cloister, Mother Victoria, and the weak and doubt-wracked Sister Virginia.

Two acts, that ask nothing more of the audience than an appreciation of biting humor.