Hearing a story on the radio about a woman who was adopted as a child reuniting with her mother after 43 years led two actors to write a play on the themes of separation, loss and dislocation, writes Arminta Wallace
'We all knew about it, but nobody knew the details. It was like the bogeyman - it was just there. You didn't think about it if you could help it." Sitting in the foyer of a hotel on O'Connell Street in 2002, with an anti-racism demonstration running its exuberant course on the street outside, it's almost impossible to conjure up the Ireland of half a century ago: the poverty; the isolation; the tight-lipped, buttoned-up, "whatever you say, say nothing" culture. But The Stolen Child, a new play written by actors Bairbre Ní Chaoimh and Yvonne Quinn, aims to do exactly that.
Quinn and Ní Chaoimh first met when they trained at the Stanislavski studio at the Focus Theatre in the early 1980s. They took time out to travel to India and Pakistan together, after which Quinn moved to London to concentrate on writing while Ní Chaoimh continued her acting career in Dublin - but the friendship survived and was enhanced when, some five years later, they married a pair of brothers. In 1995, Ní Chaoimh heard an item on the Gay Byrne radio show about an adopted woman who had been reunited with her mother after 43 years. In the course of a very emotional interview, the mother referred to her own upbringing in an industrial school. When Quinn and Ní Chaoimh began to research the story, they realised it was just one of thousands which had never been told - and the result is The Stolen Child, with its themes of forcible separation, loss and dislocation.
In the course of this research Quinn and Ní Chaoimh talked to women who had been sent to industrial schools as young children, women who had themselves been adopted, social workers, nuns and hospital matrons. "Their experiences were quite incredible," says Ní Chaoimh. "It was a real education for us. For example, we had a very romantic idea of what it meant to be adopted; we also had very romantic ideas about what it would be like to be reunited with a natural parent after a lifetime of separation.
"There seems to be a universal yearning for a mother figure, whether it's a real mother or a spiritual mother, an earth mother, as it were - but nobody really thinks that their mother is going to turn out to be a drug addict or a prostitute, or that they may be the product of incest. So if you're searching for your mother and somebody points that out to you, it suddenly becomes a terrifying prospect."
The real eye-opener, though, was the almost casual cruelty of life in the industrial schools, which were so prevalent in Ireland from the 1930s to the 1950s and beyond. "We had this vague idea that industrial school and reformatory were the same, and of course they weren't," says Quinn. "Most of the people who went to industrial schools were committed by the courts, but very often because of poverty; perhaps one parent had TB and was too ill to look after them, perhaps one parent had died. Some were sent there for mitching. You could end up there at the stroke of a pen."
Quinn and Ní Chaoimh decided to focus on one school in Cavan where, in 1943, 35 children died in a horrific fire. "There was an inquiry into the fire, which of course was designed to exonerate the authorities, so there was masses of information in the transcripts - because when we began to look into this whole subject, very little information was a matter of public record," says Ní Chaoimh.
"But what especially interested us was that the school was run by an enclosed order of nuns. Of all people to put in charge of children; women who have taken a vow to cut themselves off from the world and who have deliberately avoided having children themselves. It seems crazy. But then, talking to the nuns we became aware that many of them had had very limited options in life as well: marriage, emigration or the convent. That was it. If you became a nun in that sort of order, you went through rigorous training to rid yourself of any sense of self; and then they were passing on that discipline to little girls. Simple things, sometimes; like, you have 80 children having their dinner and nobody's allowed speak. Can you imagine? So it wasn't just a case of saying, 'oh, well, these were cruel women'."
As Ní Chaoimh knows from her work as artistic director of Calypso Productions, however, heart-rending stories don't - in themselves - necessarily make good theatre. Calypso has always aimed at mounting productions which, while challenging the boundaries of theatrical creativity, also show a finely-honed political awareness. For the sake of dramatic immediacy Quinn (who has written plays for radio but never, until now, for the theatre) decided to begin with a contemporary figure - a thirtysomething adopted woman who owns her own business and her own apartment, who has relationships but has decided not to get married - and try to portray the contrast between her life and the life of the natural mother she eventually tracks down.
'The mother has had her child forcibly taken from her - not because she decided to give it up, but because somebody in authority decided that as a lone parent she was by definition unfit to raise a child. What happens when you get that articulate middle-class person meeting somebody who has been taught how to scrub and clean? Is there any future for them, if they meet when one is thirtysomething and the other is in her 60s? Have they any common ground?"
Given that Quinn now lives in Leicester and Ní Chaoimh in Dublin, the writing of The Stolen Child was a protracted business involving everything from pen and paper to fax machines to occasional weeks at Annaghmakerrig. "We were much slower before we got the e-mail going, but we've got some terrible phone bills," says Quinn. "And remember we wrote our first act at Annaghmakerrig in 1996 or 1997," adds Ní Chaoimh, "and sure we thought it was wonderful. And when we look back now we just think, 'God - it's so bad'. It was far more convoluted, there were lots of characters, there was the dead adoptive mother who came in as a ghost - which we thought was a great dramatic device."
"One mother too many, to be honest," laughs Quinn.
The cast now consists of just four characters, played by Rosaleen Linehan, Cathy Belton, Seamus Moran and Malachy McKenna. "What it's really about," says Quinn, "is how we have treated our children. If you're small and vulnerable and you don't have anyone to stand up for you, you really have no value. That's not just true of Ireland - you see it in China and Romania, too. But despite the inquiries and the Redress Commission and the compensation, which is now, belatedly, being paid out to people, you can never repay someone for a lost childhood. You can't ever make it right."
Calypso Productions presents The Stolen Child at Andrews Lane Theatre from Thursday and at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, from September 24th