Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan: Sounding the Sorrow of the Irish Magdalene Women

Description

This lecture was delivered as part of the National University of Ireland, Galway International Irish Studies Summer School.

Patricia Burke Brogan’s stage play Eclipsed creates the interior of an Irish Magdalene laundry through an intense visual and lyrical quality and capturing a powerful sense of claustrophobia, sorrow, loss and anger. The text, which is set in both 1992 and 1963, is structured around one character, Rosa, and her search for details of her mother and her birth. Rosa’s story quickly becomes Bridget’s story whose traumas as an unmarried mother in 1960s Ireland are woven into a narrative of the many women whose children were given up for adoption by the Catholic Church. This lecture presented a reading of how Burke Brogan exposes the unjust treatment of the most vulnerable and precious in Irish society and the reverberations of this treatment intergenerationally.

Period	17 Jul 2018
Held at	National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Degree of Recognition	National