By staging her play in a former Magdalene
laundry the playwright compels the audience to inhabit the haunted
spaces of Irish history. As a child growing up in Dublin’s north inner city Louise Lowe
was warned by her mother that if she was bold she’d end up in the
Gloucester Street Magdalene laundry.
And Lowe did eventually end up in
the laundry building on what is now Sean McDermott Street, formally
known as the Monastery of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. Just a few
minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street, it closed in 1996 but is inert and
intact, a looming relic of a system of mass incarceration. In 2011 Lowe
and her collaborators at Anu Productions occupied the building to create one of the most powerful pieces of contemporary Irish theatre, Laundry.