Fringe 2024 – The Daughters of Róisín ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Barefoot in a long white nightdress, Aoibh Johnson stands alone on stage. As she walks around the room she begins to recite.

But as she walks, her gestures become increasingly animated, and at each repetition of the chorus of Luke Kelly’s For What Died The Sons of Róisín? the words ‘sons’ and ‘men’ become louder and louder.

Kelly possibly didn’t intend his poem to be only about men; many, many women have fought for Ireland’s freedom. But Johnson is thinking of other women, “But now I ask and you should ask and we should ask, for what died the daughters of Róisín? Was it shame?”

Johnson plays the part of a young woman in, perhaps, the late 1920s – she talks of her excitement at seeing talking pictures for the first time.

But now that young woman is a prisoner in one room of her parents’ house. She kneels on the floor and insists,

Why does she need to affirm this? Because everyone else – her mother, the priest – is telling her she is sick. She is ‘infected’ with something that is all her own fault, she allowed it to happen. And now she must hide away until that sickness is past. She must not go near the front windows, the neighbours must not see her. But she is, she tells us, lucky; many girls like her would’ve been thrown out, abandoned, sent to Magdalen laundries.

Throughout the 20th century unmarried Irish girls who became pregnant were ostracised, blamed, hidden and frequently physically abused. Once born, their babies were taken away from them and handed over to religious orders who arranged their adoption, usually in return for a large fee. The iron grip of the Catholic church was such that few people dared to challenge it. Pregnancy outwith marriage was a mortal sin. In The Daughters of Róisín we witness the harrowing experience of one girl, but in her we also see the anguish of every woman who suffered at the hands of a powerful, judgemental and hypocritical church, a compliant state and a bewitched population.

Johnson tells her character’s story through a mixture of song and poetry, words and silence. She is a gifted actress, drawing the audience into her story, engaging with them, asking them questions. At first she is sometimes light-hearted, speaking of how she always wanted more from life than her father’s mantra to ‘work hard, pay your way and pray your way.’

She talks about marriage, asks the women in the audience if they hadn’t always dreamed of their wedding day? Draping a sheet around herself, she prances happily up and down; she longed, she says, for the attention. She recalls being a flower girl for her aunt, of the woman’s pre-wedding nerves, and her own mother covering her ears when her aunt laments her sexual ignorance. She loves to watch romantic films at the cinema. On both sides of the Irish Sea at that time, girls were told nothing about sex, their wedding nights too often seen in terms of male conquest.

‘What does my mother know?’ asks the girl, at first with the derision of a teenager for a parent, but then more urgently, the words encapsulating the secrecy that surrounded sex,

The baby the girl is carrying is never referred to as such. It is always ‘the sickness’ – but despite this, she develops a relationship with it, talks to it about the trees and her home, about her wish to fly far away like the birds she sees through her tiny window, to be free from her room and free from an Ireland she no longer recognises. At one point she sings Henry Joy (Faithful to the Last).

It’s a song about freedom, but it’s also a song in praise of the mother country. The girl still loves this country, the one that was once full of possibilities, but now,

Ireland has betrayed her, as it has betrayed all the women like her. Its warped version of godliness has placed respectability above humanity; it has made its daughters pay the price.

And then she’s once more animated, excited to tell us how she caught this sickness. She went to a dance, where she felt for the first time beautiful, special, important. The next morning that was all over.

The power of silence is well used in this play. The girl explains that she tried to contact the father, ‘but…..’ There is nothing more to say. She is alone but for her parents and ‘a visitor.’

The visitor is the Catholic church, although she never refers to it as that; instead Johnson makes a spire with her hands to show us what she means. The visitor wants to clean all the dirt from everybody’s houses, but all he really does is,

Again the audience is brought into the story, as together we chant that last line and Johnson frantically sweeps and cleans. This is what Ireland did. It hid its sinful women. God must not see them. And yet the girl can’t believe God is angry with her, or with any other woman in a similar plight; thinking about those women makes her feel a little less alone. She prays for them, for kindness for them.

The visitor – the priest – now calls frequently. He will ‘give her sickness to someone else, someone better equipped.’ She is interrogated as to how the pregnancy happened – had she planned it? Did she enjoy it?

As time passes Johnson shows us, through tiny gestures and transient expressions of confusion and fear, the girl becoming ever more fragile. We see her mind start to wander. She becomes ghostly, ethereal. There are fewer jokes, and then none.

Yet despite all the pain, The Daughters of Róisín also sounds out a furious battle cry. Johnson stands on a chair (one of the very few props) and, using the terminology of labour and birth, rallies women,

The most moving scene of the play occurs after the birth of ‘the sickness’. Johnson wanders the room, laying sheets – shrouds – over her chair, her broom and her bucket. She is broken. Ireland has rejected her and now she rejects it; she sings a song of emigration. Johnson tells us to ask not ‘for what died the daughters of Róisín?’ but ‘for what they sailed?’

Johnson has spent a large part of this hour on her knees, a single spotlight illuminating her blond hair, and now we know why. But a hundred years on, she knows to whom she owes her own allegiance, and to whom we should owe ours,

In The Daughters of Róisín Aoibh Johnson rips apart the cloak of secrecy that has for so long shrouded some of Ireland’s most unforgivable secrets. This is not loud theatre, we do not feel harangued; instead we feel deeply moved by the suffering of innocent women at the hands of men – lovers, rapists, fathers, priests – who for so long controlled their lives, and the women who were too afraid to stop them. Ireland may be emerging from its dark past, but in many countries women are still subjugated, punished and even murdered for refusing to toe the line. We owe our allegiance to all of them.

At the end of the play, Johnson returns to explain the deeply personal source of her writing.

Johnson is part of Wee Yarn Productions, a small company that believes creativity has the power to provoke radical, lasting change in the lives of communities.

Claire Keegan’s excellent 2022 novella Small Things Like These looks at the cruel treatment of women from the perspective of a bystander who has to choose whether or not to stand by. The Daughters of Róisín goes one step further, telling the story from within by giving one woman – every woman – her own vital, raw and unstoppable voice.

The Daughters of Róisín is directed by Cahal Clarke, co-producer (with Johnson) at Wee Yarn Productions. Ossie Clarke is the show’s technical manager, and must be particularly congratulated on its effective use of lighting.

The show is at Venue 33, Pleasance Courtyard, Bunker One at 13.00 every day until 25^th August. Tickets here.