Asylum Workshop – Black Box Theatre, Tu Dublin, Grangegorman, Dublin

Written by: Colin Murphy

Directed by: Peter McDermott

There are many good things to say about this impactful work, not least the performances of TU Dublin’s final-year Drama students. Playwright, Colin Murphy after what must have been extensive research, bases his docudrama on real life facts, records, testimonies, medical reports, and analyses to present how people were treated for mental health issues. This includes barbaric medical mistreatment and forced incarceration in what was once called, the ‘Lunatic Asylum.’ Later this became St. Brendan’s mental hospital and today, as a vibrant university institution, it is called Grangegorman.

Multi-layered and entirely engaging, this fast-paced production, treats this difficult and disturbing corner of our history with reverence. Director Peter McDermott employs several techniques to effectively juxtapose fact and fiction, making connections both historically and metaphorically. The opening scene takes in a class of drama students chatting and then rehearsing for a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This somehow cleverly segues into the same students researching and then presenting another play about the very space they are working in which was once an asylum for lunatics.

Interestingly, Hamlet’s psychological state of mind and especially his feelings for Ophelia become a kind of leitmotif of the performance of Asylum Workshop. One student in typical Brechtian style steps out of character to deride the others about Hamlet’s attitude to Ophelia. The ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ speech (Act three, scene 1, Hamlet) which could be interpreted as a transference of Hamlet’s rage over Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius, at Ophelia or even at all women is used as a symbolic reference to the play. Other Brechtian conventions are employed, like the use a narrator and using text that is lit up on a screen to delineate and outline a new scene. The energetic ensemble acting team, each playing multi-roles from the cast of 23 deliver highly polished performances.

Sinéad O’Donnell-Carey’s set design took the form of a storeroom on two levels – somewhat sterile, but with a mishmash of clutter and discarded items. It could be described as a spatial metaphor for a lunatic asylum or even the inside of a disturbed mind with the levels representing reality versus illusion or the conscious and subconscious minds, and the symbolism attached to the many items shrouded in cloths, ‘covered up’ or ‘hidden’.

Documentary or verbatim theatre like this should inform us not just about the injustice of what happened, it should portray patients people as real as you and me. Asylum Workshop certainly achieves this and does so in a respectful and sensitive way. Much of the interaction for example, follows one case study, patient no 19308, Clare Keely, a doubleganger and allegorical Ophelia who spends thirty-four years in the asylum, never receives treatment and sadly dies there alone at sixty-two.

Asylum Workshop raises interesting if difficult questions on the ethics of this history even offering some answers. Why did Ireland, compared to other countries globally, have a much greater number of institutionalised psychiatric patients? There is no one reason why Ireland locked up so many people but a combination of many reasons. The national obsession with owning land meant many families had some members ‘certified to clean out the house.’ Other patients were simply the victims of sexual abuse, and so rejected by their families they spent their lives going from one institution to the next. Another reason was that any behaviour that was contrary to what was considered ‘normal’ in the conservative, Catholic-dominated society of the time could be diagnosed as insanity. One patient explaining why he and others were incarcerated says it was because ‘they had problems being themselves.’ Asylum patients were simply the victims of a conformist, impoverished and ignorant society.

Powerful documentary theatre at its best, Asylum Workshop is a profound presentation of a series of sad events. There is no happy ending or indeed no story as such. As playwright Colin Murphy writes in the programme note, it is, ‘the story of the attempt to impose narrative on something that defies narrative.’

Runs until Saturday June 24^th2023.