Gate Theatre, 5 April–12 May 2024
Directed by Louise Lowe
By Sylvie Kleinman
Fictionalising the past is a creative process that can make historians uneasy, though many admit enjoying a well-researched costume drama or novel. We quickly identify what is plucked out of context to validate or mirror present-day concerns or norms, and this reviewer is easily irritated by ahistorical make-up or by males and females hugging and kissing in public, a serious skewing of how rigid social interaction codes really were. This finely produced play is successfully adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars (2020), which unintentionally but profoundly resonated for readers during the recent pandemic and lockdown, as it is set in Dublin during the 1918 ’flu epidemic. The title evokes the old Italian belief that the ’flu originated in the influenza delle stelle or ‘influence of the stars’. Donoghue had won well-deserved praise for other historical novels like her masterful Slammerkin (2000) and The Wonder (2016), which is set in rural Ireland in 1859. In this adaptation, there is a judicious balance between factual accuracy and appropriate rendition of the period. The Pull also appeals as it lightly references the ongoing war, post-Rising tensions and the emerging new Ireland. It foregrounds the increasing mainstreaming of gender and class into Irish history, though influenza transcended inequalities and made all vulnerable.
Over three days, the action tightly focuses on how the medical emergency affected expectant women; while the novel is narrated by the central character, Julia Power, their young and dedicated midwife, the stage script spreads the dialogue over all the protagonists. In the book males pop up in Julia’s daily routine and include her shell-shocked brother, whereas the stage version is very effectively narrowed down to an all-female cast of seven. The action is mostly set in a makeshift maternity ward in the cramped storeroom of an understaffed Dublin hospital, broken by one transformative scene on its roof and brief interludes of well-crafted dark urban street scenes, with eerily masked people moving about. Three pregnant women are quarantined and attended to by Julia (Sarah Morris), supervised by the formidable Sister Luke (Ruth McCabe), an ad hoc orderly Bridie Sweeney (Ghaliah Conroy), and Dr Kathleen Lynn (Maeve Fitzgerald), convincingly borrowed from real life.
There are intense and realistic birthing scenes, with some theatrical blood and manoeuvring of legs familiar to those who know what motherhood entails. The frantic placenta-ripping scene is audacious and quite raw, possibly an indirect reference to the after-birth complications from which Mary Wollstonecraft died. But the human spirit prevails and the tragic is tempered by flashes of wit and biting humour. The eighteen-year-old bride Mary Tierney (Ciara Byrne) gazes scientifically at her navel, revealing that she knows nothing about delivery, but later ponders rhetorically whether she’ll ‘have to do this every year’. Bridie is a childish and uneducated orphan trapped in a ‘mother and baby’ home, who brings in a delirious veteran mother, Mrs Noonan, from the nearby Magdalene Laundry. In another outstanding performance, Una Kavanagh poignantly portrays this pitifully unhealthy and woefully neglected woman who, unsurprisingly, is harshly treated by Sister Luke and does not survive. To escape the home, the plucky and enterprising Bridie rolls up her sleeves and quickly becomes useful to Julia. She gets the logistics of delivery, once the image in the midwifery manual is turned right side up—‘Janey Mac!’.
An ear for Dublinese is essential to catch some of the quick-fire repartee, and the dialogue is fast-paced and well scripted. Conroy’s compelling character eventually stirs something intimate in Julia’s private being, another pull of sorts sealed with a tender embrace during the roof scene. The posh Mrs Garrett (an engaging India Mullen) in her over-frilly silk nightdress peers out over her magazine, interacting indignantly, or sympathetically, with the other women. In the play’s only political macro-historical quip, she resents the intervention of the otherwise necessary Sinn Féiner, Lynn, but draws everyone’s empathy when her baby is stillborn two months early (although one questions whether in 1918 a mother would actually have been shown her premature dead infant).
The character of Lynn is well portrayed as a no-nonsense, competent, caring and busy professional on the run in the outside world, complete with a jolly-hockey-sticks delivery that many could not imagine her without. In real life Lynn was probably more soft-spoken and self-effacing, and there is no evidence (regrettably) that she ever publicly or privately vocalised the view that ‘Irish women had too many babies’, especially before 1930, when her Anglican church accepted contraception within marriage. Nor is she on record for having stated (in 21st-century language) that Madeleine ffrench-Mullen was her ‘partner in all things’, though she had (cleverly) written her into her own Bureau of Military History statement as her ‘closest friend’, who had lived with her ‘for thirty years’ until her death. Tweaking of historical facts here do not, however, distort, and the contextual representation of these women is credible.
Referencing a ‘mother and baby’ home may be a retrofit, and hints of child abuse and the plight of the Magdalenes obviously reflect our understanding of these scandals from the very recent past. Bridie wonders at the concept of a birthday, not knowing her own. She acquires one, shared with one of the newborns, as her true self emerges. Direct evidence is lacking for conditions c. 1918, and an international study of Catholic inhumanity and cruelty in such institutions abroad would not go amiss.
Julia remains pivotal in her caring role as a front-line worker of sorts in this enjoyable and stimulating production, a rare fictional spin-off from the Decade of Centenaries. Possibly a bit twee at times for some contemporary tastes, this is conventional theatre, but every aspect of direction, sets, costumes and performance is robust, commendable and enjoyable. In the enforced proximity of a single room, the women connect and come to share each other’s sufferings and hopes in a moving form of ‘sisterhood’, as the Gate promotional literature terms it.
Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin.