As Part of the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival, we present dlr Mill Theatre’s February 2020 production online of Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan.  This is an award winning play set in a Magdalene laundry during the 1960’s It is one of the first plays to tell the story of the Magdalene laundries and was inspired by Patricia’s own experience as a young novitiate. Her play highlights the plight of four women who struggle to bear the austerity of their existence and desire to break the shackles of this landmark of societal repression.  This is a poignant, funny, moving and sad play. We are starkly reminded of the brutal intolerance of ‘female deviance’ in our country’s not so distant past while also being brought on a finely crafted journey of friendship, love, hope and survival.

“I was brought into this huge space with these machines – the noise of the machines, the deafening noise – and then out of the haze I saw these women, young women, old women, and they looked at me like I was another of the people who’d locked them up . . . it was like I was in Dante’s inferno.” – Patricia Burke Brogan