They were called the Magdalene Laundries, and if you’ve never heard of them, you’re not alone. In fact, public unawareness was the driving force behind Joe Murtagh’s decade-long project in the making The Woman in the Wall.
Comprising a sinister chapter in Ireland’s history, the laundries were Catholic Church-run institutions that took “fallen” girls and women from their homes and forced them into unpaid labor, all the while exacting extreme physical and psychological abuse on them in the name of reformation.
It’s reported that some ten thousand women and girls were imprisoned in these facilities from 1922 until 1996, although many feel this number is a gross underestimate. Children born to unwed girls in the affiliated mother-and-baby homes were separated from their mothers, and many of them died in these homes. Discovery of mass unmarked graves (such as in Tuam, County Galway) has sparked an investigation in recent years, but for close to a century, these horrific facilities were permitted to carry on their inhuman operations.
Murtagh could not understand how such institutions could have existed, unchallenged and unexposed, right up until the 1990s. He started to write a story, putting it away and coming back to it over the course of ten years to give the subject matter the time and care it warranted. His mini-series centers around Lorna Brady, a survivor of the laundries (played by Ruth Wilson) and Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack).
Joe Murtagh
Criminal events that take place years after the institution’s closure force Lorna and other women in her town to relive their past trauma, and fellow community members to confront their part in the secrecy that shrouded the abuse. Creative Screenwriting Magazine spoke with Murtagh about the story and the role of research, Gothic elements, and even humor, in its development.
Tell me the story of the Magdalene Laundries and how you first learned about them.
How I came to learn about them is probably the most significant thing about this whole story for me. I watched a film called The Magdalene Sisters when I was in my early 20s. My whole family is Irish, dating back generations, but I had never heard of these places before. I read more about them and I just couldn’t believe two things. One, the scale of the horror and how many thousands of lives this had touched, and two, the fact that they were relatively recent, the last laundry having closed in 1996 and the last mother-baby home having closed in 1990.
It also seemed like very few people outside of Ireland knew about them. So for me, the attraction to telling this story was to address that more than anything else. On the one hand, it was to try and excavate the history of the laundries and set them in a contemporary period where you could really see the effects they had and are still having. But it was mostly about addressing the disparity in how few people seem to know about them.
Was the subject matter contentious or difficult to navigate when you were researching and drafting the story?
Weirdly, I would say that any contention came more from me and from ourselves (the filmmakers) in our trepidation in approaching this subject matter. When we spoke to survivors, I was expecting there to be a lot of contention, but there was none at all. These women were so open to talking to us, which was an amazing thing in its own right. These places were built on this idea of shame, a very powerful idea that had been instilled into all of them. They needed to be ashamed of who they were as people and what they had apparently done. It dominated thousands of people. So, for these women to be able to talk to us so openly about it was quite a paradoxical experience.
I wrote the story on and off over the course of ten years or so, and I kept stopping because of fear. I was afraid that I shouldn’t be telling the story at all, and that I had no right to do so. But in that same ten year period, more and more news about this was coming out, like the Tuam scandal where they found two hundred bodies in a mass grave. There’s another one related to a mother and baby home that they’re trying to look into now. There are way more horrors yet to be discovered. In the end I decided that I was just going to have to go for it because I was in a position to do so.
Tell me more about the experience of speaking with survivors. How did you find them? What kinds of records were kept?
We worked with the brilliant charity, Justice for Magdalenes Research. They work directly with survivors and get them whatever help they need in whatever form that might take. They also work to educate the public and get this history out there, mostly to ensure that nothing like it will ever happen again. We worked with a research consultant there who gave us everything we needed to know and put us in contact with survivors. The organization also has a lot of resources – books, first hand testimonies and written accounts – that they could provide us with.
Before we even approached them, we watched every film and documentary and read every book and testimony we could get our hands on. But the research materials could be quite few and far between. The more research I did, the more it made sense that it first took a film to teach me about this part of history. It’s not taught in the curriculum, which it should be. That’s why I think making films and television shows is, at the moment, the only way of really getting this story out there in a way that people will actually be able to engage with it.
Have you witnessed a trend towards “education” in entertainment and learning from the types of stories we are telling?
I think it’s more that TV has been getting better and better over the past couple of decades. I think we’re in a position now where we know that viewers are willing to sit down and really engage with a six hour, eight hour, twelve hour story. When you have that scope and time within which to tell a story, as long as it has great characters and a great premise behind it, people are willing to engage with it. It’s the perfect format to be able to deliver perhaps a lesser-known piece of history or a really important social issue. Maybe it’s an overall trend in the way television’s been going that has allowed us to do that, I don’t know for sure. But I think it’s a very good thing in that it allows us to get those lesser-known stories and parts of history out there. All of that equates to more empathy, and real change where you want to see it.
How closely do the events depicted in the series parallel the actual history?
In terms of the places themselves, everything is completely based in fact. Every monologue that we wrote into it, every story the characters are telling about the laundries, is based on a real account.
When I first started writing, I thought, “How am I going to fill six hours of television?” But by the end of it, I felt like six hours was not nearly enough. A lot of our characters’ stories are combinations of quite a few different testimonies gathered into a single character. But historically, everything is completely based in research that we did.
Let’s talk about your characters, Lorna Brady in particular. How did you want to portray her in relation to the other survivors, all of whom are quite unique in how they’ve dealt with their past trauma?
I wanted Lorna to be a contemporary woman. I wanted the whole series to be contemporary. It would have been possible to make a show set in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s and deliver a compelling story about one of the laundries. But I really wanted it to be contemporary in order to show that this is still going on. I didn’t want audiences to have a feeling of relief after it was over and think, “Oh well.Thank God we’re not like that anymore.”
Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson) Photo by Chris Barr/ SHOWTIME
I really wanted to make Lorna a classic Gothic character. From the very beginning, I was thinking, “What would an Edgar Allan Poe character look like in the west of Ireland in a contemporary setting? Who’s also a Magdalene laundry survivor?”
That’s why I brought in a sleepwalking element. I knew I wanted her to be an outsider because I think it just makes for a more empathetic character from the get-go. You take an underdog and you can use them to bring an audience along for the ride in an otherwise quite obscure story. So that’s what I did.
From the beginning – and even more so after speaking with the survivors – it was really important to me that the women were distinctive: that they weren’t victims, they were individual women who all went through terrible things and processed those things in very different ways. That felt more realistic to me, and that’s why they all ended up as characters who are very different from one another, including in terms of age. There’s a scene in the first episode where they are all meeting and the age ranges around the room is a visual indication of how long this history has been going on for and how many different types of lives it’s touched.
What role does sleep play in the story? Not just for Lorna, but also for Colman.
It was two things. On a more surface level, it was just a big nod to Gothic literature. I wanted to work with the genre elements that really interest me. And I knew that, as the story went on, it would be a fun way to develop the plot and the character.
Colman (Daryl McCormack) Photo by Chris Barr/ BBC/ Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
On a slightly deeper level, it creates the ultimate unreliable narrator. Again, that is very common to Gothic literature. But what I loved about that in this context is you’re taking a woman who went through something absolutely horrific and then is basically being called a liar all her life. I thought that was quite a poignant thing to then play with the audience’s empathy levels, where on one hand, we’re completely on her side but the next minute, we’re doubting her as well. I think the sleepwalking did that job quite well; the longer the series goes on, the longer she’s been awake and the more erratic she’s going to become. When she sees things, we don’t know whether she is actually seeing them or hallucinating. That concept was something I always wanted to play with.
There are some truly gut-wrenching scenes in the series. Yet you are able to inject elements of humor. Tell me about the importance of humor in striking the right tone, especially given the heavy subject matter.
The easiest answer for that is it’s my natural way of writing. It might be a particularly Irish thing! I think it’s a very human thing, to be honest. When you’re confronted with something really dark, you tend to want to make a joke or find the crack of light within it.
There’s a lot of hardship in life, but I think in my experience, it always comes with a bit of humor. It always comes with someone saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Considering the subject matter, it was important for me to try and inject that into it as much as possible because I think it feels more authentic. I think it brings you closer to the characters, so when terrible things do happen to them, you’re just going to feel for them more.
We were always going to tread that line carefully. We had a wonderful writers’ room – it was a real safe space and so whenever one of us went too far (probably me most times) they would pull us back. It was a room where we could throw everything at the wall and if it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right.
Tell me about your experience writing this series and anything you learned that you’ll take with you into your next project.
For me, it’s about maximizing the time you can spend in the prepping, writing, and outlining stages, before it goes into someone else’s hands. That is by far the most important thing and a big lesson I’ve learned. I know that’s easier said than done when you have deadlines, producers and schedules, but, within reason, whenever you can get more time for those (preliminary) stages it saves so much more time – and a lot of headaches – further down the line.
This was a weird one, because I wrote the pilot over ten years ago, and every couple of years, would bring it out again and rewrite it. That was just me on my own. Finally it became a thing and then it was about really carving out the rest of the series, writing the Bible and being in the writers’ room. But I love the process of it.
