Image: Poster for Laundry by Anu Productions, from http://stagedreaction.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/walking-with-magdalens-laundry-at-the-dublin-theatre-festival/
Laundry (from what I have learned since - I regrettably didn't know about the work until after its run had ended) is an immersive and intimate experience of performance which leads the viewer individually through a former Magdalene laundry on Sean MacDermot street and encounters with actors playing 'Maggies', women perceived to be fallen, who were incarcerated in work asylums. Lisa Fitzgerald writes:
The Laundries took their name from Mary Magdalene, who in popular Christian lore is a former prostitute or immoral woman who repents and becomes one of Christ’s disciples. The philosophy behind the Laundries was that ‘fallen’ women – women who had engaged in sexual behaviour outside of marriage – could work and repent there and so be redeemed... They were a response to prostitution and were intended as a rehabilitative response to unsanctioned female sexuality . By the twentieth century the Laundries in Ireland were housed in Convents and offered a community laundry service, though it is well documented that the women working there were not paid for their labour, and by the 1930s were often or normally prevented from leaving the Laundry unless a family member – in some places, a male family member– signed them out. Women were signed into the Laundries because they became pregnant outside of marriage, or were victims of rape or sexual abuse, or were orphaned, or were in various ways disruptive of the dominant social order (including, it seems, that they were too pretty and likely to be a temptation to men). Those entering the Laundries were renamed, and in at least some cases their own names were lost – a number were buried in mass graves within the Convent grounds, their deaths not registered with the State and their given names not recorded.
Fitzpatrick, Lisa (2012) Representing Systemic Violence: The Example of Laundry by Anu Productions. Warwick Politics and Performance Network Working Papers Vol 1:4, University of Warwick, pp.1-2 [Internet publication]
The production by Anu gives voice to the Maggies, as they became known colloquially, but also allows for a working through of the cultural memory by the audience. The shame of the Magdalene laundries continues to run deep through Irish society. The huge institutions, like the Gloucester Street laundry below, the site of Laundry, dominated the the tenement landscape around it, demonstrating a community complicity in what was happening o the women who were imprison, and often died there.
Image: John Fitzpatrick/Twitter via ibtimes.co.uk
By presenting the performance in the original site of trauma and by leading the audience through intimate encounters with Maggie's it allows for a much needed personal and cultural confrontation of the memory and the culture of complicity. It denies the temptation to relegate the chapter to history, but instead asserts that it must be confronted as a lived and active experience. This is vital considering that the last Magdalene was committed as recently as 1995, and the effects of it still resonate throughout Irish society.
On a personal note Miriam Haughton's paper on the performance brought the tragedy of the Magdalene's back into my consciousness and begged me to engage with it. Previously I had viewed the laundry's a 'the South's shame' something that didn't penetrate the border. Researching this post however I found that there had also been these laundries in Belfast, and that they were not only run by Catholics, but also the Presbyterian church, my religious community. Now more than ever I wished I had experienced Laundry. As it turns out I have my own cultural complicity to bear.
Watch an excerpt of Laundry here, courtesy of Anu Productions:
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