A Silent Scandal @ Greenside George Street
This timely and poignant piece about abuse in 1970s Ireland ultimately falls short of incision or subversion
1970s Ireland: an ongoing scandal in a Catholic boys’ school acts as a gradually escalating drumbeat, whose reverberations echo throughout Meade Conway’s full length Fringe debut. The play opens with a nervous Ms Turley (Senna O’Hara) joining a prestigious school as a teacher, looking for a shot at professional and personal redemption: a tall order for a single mother at the time. We learn of a single boy, a 'bad apple', who has been cast out on the day of graduation, seemingly ostracised for the sake of the school’s reputation. A visit from the gardaí brings disruption to traditional pomp and ceremony, as rumblings of a not-immediately obvious scandal start to brew.
The play, directed by Sally Hennessy, feels profoundly Irish in its euphemistic references to ‘troubles' and ‘bother’, in the ever-present shadow cast (literally everywhere) by the Catholic Church. There is a cultural significance, too, to the vagueness and thinly-veiled geniality of headmaster Mr Brennan (Eoghan Quinn), and his consistent downplaying of accusations of bullying. “We can no longer claim abuse is harmless when it leads to disaster,” Ms Turley reminds colleague Pete (Ben Carolan). An apt reminder to legions of Taoisigh-past, perhaps, who failed to formally apologise to the survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes before January 2021.
Conway’s poignant writing is mostly held together by an enthusiastic ensemble performance. However, the cast’s efforts were not aided by the small and often oppressively hot performance space, where dialogue was at times drowned out by a loud fan.
Conway’s decision to leave the scandal consciously unnamed is an ultimately divisive choice. On the one hand, it lends a universality to the narrative. It becomes a portmanteau onto which the audience can hang their own assumptions about what may or may not have happened. However, in not naming the scandal, the severity of the actions is also harder to gauge and easier to gloss over. Failing to label abuses of power for exactly what they are, in the end, accords perpetrators ongoing protection. They continue to find safety in our silence. It is only by subverting this trend that we can move closer to restoring justice to historical survivors of abuse.
Whilst A Silent Scandal is a timely, well-crafted and important piece of theatre, it sadly does not deliver that justice or corresponding catharsis. Ultimately it falls short of the true (gut) punch it had the potential to land.
A Silent Scandal, Greenside @ George Street (Ivy Studio), run ended