Docu-verbatim Responds to the “Big Lie”
After the publication of the Ryan Report, the Abbey directors met to discuss how best the National Theatre could respond to its significance; their decision was to commission a documentary play. The Abbey had previously hosted the Tricycle’s touring production of Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Saville Inquiry (2005), but had never before commissioned documentary work. Aideen Howard, then literary director of the Abbey, suggested that the documentary form would do justice to this history in a more direct way than a fictionalization could.18 Though the media coverage was widespread and thorough, the Ryan Report itself was twenty-six hundred pages long, so this theatre piece was a chance for audiences to access in more depth some of the detail and individual testimony of the report.
The Abbey was astute in asking Mary Raftery to create the play, as Raftery, an investigative journalist whose work over the previous two decades had pioneered and championed the case of survivors of abuse, had an exhaustive knowledge of the institutional system and an authoritative public identity and cultural capital as a campaigner. Raftery’s 1999 television documentary series, States of Fear, was a major factor in the government’s official recognition of the abuse and then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s historic apology for the state’s “failure,” which led to the establishment of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.19 Though the resulting play is a tiny slice of the vast data in the Ryan Report—the report includes evidence from 1,712 complainants and 1,090 witness statements, yet the play is just under ninety minutes long—Raftery worked with the National Theatre team, including Howard and McBrinn, to make this tiny slice feel representative of the whole history.
Raftery used a dramatic editing technique, imported from her experience in television production, combining information from different sections of the Ryan Report into unified scenes, and alternating testimony between survivors, the religious congregations, and civil servants. Raftery also themed the sections of the play so that, roughly speaking, the first scenes are concerned with physical abuse of boys and girls, the next section is concerned with sexual abuse, and the final sections are concerned with the institutional system and its legacy for survivors. Raftery also concentrates the play on a small number of institutions that exemplify the problems of the general system. Though Raftery was a trusted pair of hands, it is still worth emphasising that her role in compiling the play was a highly interventionist one, manipulating the particular archive of the Ryan Report, as discussed below. The purpose of this manipulation was to create an accessible format, or digest, of the report itself, which Catriona Crowe, in a review of the play, argued was achieved, as No Escape is “a very successful way of dealing with a huge public issue that convulsed . . . and is still convulsing the country.”20
Creating a Timeline: “Hindsight Is Grand, Of Course”
The docu-verbatim play must situate itself clearly in time and space in relation to the subject that it seeks to represent. No Escape locates itself firmly within a combined discourse of social history and personal memory. The contrast between these two versions of the past is shocking and worth quoting in some detail:
Dept of Education: 1933 Department of Education Rules and regulations for Certified Industrial Schools—
Rule 13
. . .
(c) Chastisement with the cane, strap or birch.
Referring to (c) personal chastisement may be inflicted by the Manager, or, in his presence, by an Officer specially authorised by him. . . . No punishment not mentioned above shall be inflicted.
Sean Ryan: [Children were] hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.
. . .
There were accounts of boys being hit or beaten with a variety of sticks, including canes, ash plants, blackthorn sticks, hurleys, broom handles, hand brushes, wooden spoons, points, batons, chair rungs, yard brushes, hoes, hay forks, picked and piece of wood with leather thongs attached . . . bunches of keys, belt buckles, drain rods, rubber pram tyres, golf clubs, tyre rims, electric flexes, fan belts, horse tackled, hammers, metal rulers, butts of rifles, t-squares, gun pellets and hay ropes.
Dept of Education: Circular No11/1946—“Discipline and Punishment in Certified Schools”:
Corporal punishment should only be used as a last resort, where other forms of punishment had been unsuccessful as a means of correction.21
The duration and extent of these lists being read onstage is an early shock to the audience. The inclusion of the regulations is also significant for the years from which they date. In Act 4 Brother Reynolds states that “I would say the understanding of the abuse and its effect on the young people wasn’t known.”22 And in Act 5, Mr. Black, a former principal officer of the Department of Education says “it was a crime, but it wasn’t regarded in that light at the time.”23 Mr. Black is actually referring to an incident that occurred in 1980, yet there is a clear attempt at “archaicization” where the distance between the present and the past is exaggerated in order to explain the aberration of past events or views. Indeed, Mr. Black also comments in relation to 1980 that women working within the department were not shown files on abuse as “there was a rule at one time that girls were not to see any things like that, they were very sensitive creatures.”24 Mr. Black counters the suggestion that he, or the department, were remiss by asserting “hindsight is grand, of course.”25 Raftery is careful to resist this reimagining of recent Irish history as a premodern era. The regulations, in their careful elucidation of what represents acceptable punishment, and what does not, demonstrate that punishment by being beaten while “hanging from hooks,” for example, would have been equally unacceptable in 1946 as it is seventy years later.
In teaching this play (as a read script, not in performance), I find that students are always shocked and often overwhelmed by these lists. In each class there is also at least one student who, as a result, cannot read any further or who finds the material so disturbing that they choose not to come to class; this is always the risk in teaching emotionally difficult plays. The students who choose to write on this play show great insight into it as a constructed work, calling attention to the ways that this scene functions to contrast the regulations on the one hand and the experience of punishment on the other, and to identify the “rules” as one version of history and the survivors’ embodied remembrance of physical abuse as an alternate version. The students’ reactions thus demonstrate both the risk of alienating or abjecting an audience by confronting them with emotionally overwhelming material, and the possible intellectual reward of the same confrontation. This is not a criticism of those students who do not, or cannot, engage with the text but an observation of the different impacts of docu-verbatim representations of painful memory. Though there are other highly emotive plays in this course, this is the only play that stimulates this adverse reaction, and it is the only docu-verbatim play, which suggests that fictional plays (about suicide, infant death, and so on) are more easily processed.
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