Aoibh Johnson told David Hennessy about her one woman show The Daughters of Róisín, that deals with Ireland’s shameful history of unmarried mothers and their children, ahead of its run at ICC in Hammersmith.
The Daughters of Róisín comes to the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this week.
Aoibh Johnson’s one woman show is an ode to Ireland’s hidden past and explores the church and state sanctioned abuse against unmarried women and their babies.
Inspired by a personal story from Aoibh’s own family background, the piece has received rave reviews including at the Edinburgh Fringe and also as far away as Adelaide Fringe Festival, South Australia in 2020.
Aoibh Johnson (28) from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone was only 22 when she was inspired to write about the harrowing story she had known of all her life.
The Daughters of Róisin is deeply emotional as it shows the demise of a young, pregnant woman forced to hide from society.
What inspired The Daughters of Róisín?
“I was studying contemporary performance practice and we were encouraged to choose our own theme or topic to explore contemporary performance.
“I chose feminist protest theatre which I always say to people ‘not very employable but I was very passionate about it’.
“But you know what? I actually ate my words because it’s ended up being a very fruitful career.
“I was allowed, for my dissertation, to do practice as research which means that I could create a piece of art. Rather than just write about what I’d learned, I could show them what I’d learned practically.
“I just remember being like, ‘What do I have to protest about?’
“And obviously there were so many things.
“I debated for so long about the amount of things in Ireland for Irish women and how women have been written out of history or shoved under the carpet basically for so many years.
“I was chatting to my family and this story came up again about my grandfather and the fact that he was adopted and he was taken off his mother in the early 1930s.
“I just remember it just hit me in the face.
“I’ve always known this about my family but in that moment I just thought, ‘This is crazy’.
“So many Irish families accept this as a normal thing that has happened to people in their families.
“I was like, ‘I have to write about this’.
“So that’s when the fire was lit for the story.
“I dived really deeply into the research behind that and started to really get more and more angry really about how many women were impacted, how many babies were impacted, how many families are impacted.
“I decided to write the play.”
You said you were torn between several different topics to cover, what else were you thinking about?
“At that time Repeal the Eighth was a really big issue.
“I actually wrote a couple of small pieces about abortion rights and the freedom of choice for women in Ireland.
“That’s a really big one.
“I also think that historically women have been written out of history in Ireland for so long.
“If we look at even our colonial history dating right back to the rising and then going to the troubles, how little women have featured in the rhetoric.
“Writing women back into history is really, really important.
“I love Ireland.
“I’m so proud to be Irish.
“I love my country. I love my identity as an Irish woman but Ireland is notoriously known for not treating women with respect.
“I feel like there was 40,000 things I could have written about when it comes to Ireland and women.
“That was a big one glaring me in the face because it impacted my family personally, very, very personally and I wanted to advocate for Kathleen.
“Kathleen’s my great grandmother, Kathleen Barry, and at the end of every show, I ask people to say her name and remember her name because people didn’t say it for so long.
“That was really important to me and now people have been saying it all over the world which is amazing.”
I bet that’s more important than any award or positive review, right?
“Yeah, 100%.
“At the Fringe I remember it just being amazing because a few times after the show, we would have people tweet saying how they loved it and they would be like #KathleenBarry, or being like, ‘Remember Kathleen Barry’.
“And we were going, ‘Wow, Kathleen Barry’s name is everywhere’.
“That was really, really cool.
“One of the craziest things is that one of the first times I performed in Belfast I performed in The Duncairn art centre and that’s actually just a street over from where Kathleen lived and where she experienced all of this.
“That was a very weird, serendipitous moment.
“I remember thinking at the time, ‘I am standing here on a stage in front of 300 people and I’m unashamedly saying her name, telling what happened, being like, ‘I am so proud to be a great granddaughter of Kathleen Barry’.’
“She would have walked those same streets with so much shame and so much silence and so much secrecy.
“I just thought, ‘Isn’t it incredible that, not even 100 years later, her blood is standing up and saying, ‘Actually, we’re not one bit ashamed of what happened’.
“I think it just shows how thank goodness we’re moving in the right direction and these stories are finally being brought out of the dark which is so amazing.
“That’s incredible for me really as an artist and a maker.”
Tell me more about the reactions to the play.
I’d say whether it’s to you or to each other, it opens up a conversation, is that what you find?
“Totally, yeah.
“I can soundly say now that we’ve been touring it now for so long, we have never done a performance of the show where we haven’t had at least three women or five women, or sometimes 20 women queuing up to speak to us after, and the people are chatting to each other.
“People are sharing stories they’ve never told before.
“There’s so much and people want to talk about it.
“I think what’s really amazing.
“Something that was so shrouded in silence and secrecy when you put it out into the public eye like that and you just say, ‘We’re talking about it and we’re really unashamed’, people follow suit.
“Yeah, people come and speak to us a lot.
“I think they feel, as people who are producing this work, we understand it and we appreciate it.
“I feel like they feel safe to come and talk to us about it which is amazing.
“The response has always been incredible.
“There was one lady, I’ll never forget her as long as I live.
“She was in her 80s and she said to me, ‘I’ve been looking for my son for over 50 years and I’ve never found him’.
“And she said, ‘Sometimes you feel like giving up and then you see a young woman in her 20s talking about you’.
“That is the greatest compliment to us, to think that we are giving these people who are on this lifelong journey hope and showing them that we care.
“They just don’t feel like people care.
“That’s how they feel so it’s showing people that we care and I care.
“As a young Irish woman, that matters to me so much.
“The response is incredible that way.”
The last Magdalene Laundry only closed in the 90s, this is still very recent history..
“There was a lady in the creative writing class and she said to me, ‘Yeah, my baby was taken off me in 1990’.
“I was going, ‘What? I just can’t wrap my head around that at all’.
“You think that it’s something so ancient and it’s just so not which is crazy.”
Do you feel the silence is broken now with things like this play, Philomena, Small Things Like These etc?
“That’s exactly it.
“There’s an exhibition happening in Derry at the moment about all of the survivors of institutional abuse and I ran the creative writing workshops for that with the survivors.
“They were saying, ‘Look at all this media about us’.
“They were so moved by that and it just shows you how important art is in these times because policy and government input is so important and that’s what we want but it takes art sometimes to actually make things happen.
“Art brings it to the surface and shows people that people care about it and that makes moves then with policy.
“It shouldn’t really be that way around but it just shows you the importance of art and the importance of creativity for activism and for protest and for change.
“That’s what I think is really important.”
It’s just yourself on stage. Did it always have to be that way or did you ever think of incorporating other characters or anything like that?
“Yeah, her experience was lonely. She experienced it by herself so I think it was important for me to experience it by myself as well.
“A one woman show is difficult because you’re on stage alone for an hour.
“It’s just you and the audience, and you’re gonna have 400 people just staring at you which is tough.
“I think it was always important that it was just me on the stage.
“I also spoke to my Nana at the time and I’ll never forget her saying, ‘Kathleen’s blood runs through your veins’.
“It was really important to me that we were sharing her story in a very ethical way and as a family member.
“We now have inherited the story and I think it’s only right that only her blood shares the story and we don’t give it to anyone else to be kind of exploited in any way.
“So yeah, it was really important that it was just me on the stage and I would tell it with tenderness and with heart and soul.”
In 2024 at the Edinburgh Fringe Aoibh was nominated for the Filipa Bragança Award for best female solo performance.
“We were really delighted to be nominated at the fringe for the Filipa Bragança Award.
“We were nominated for best solo female performance at the fringe which has over 4,000 shows. There was only six people nominated and to be one of those people for this little show about my family was a really big deal for us.
“We really were blown away by that.
“We’re really proud of that.
“The show was never about winning awards or was never about selling out everywhere you went but to get that as well makes us feel even more proud because it elevated the visibility of this history.
“To be nominated for that was incredible.”
Is it difficult or even draining to perform? Does it take a lot out of you?
“Yeah, it really does.
“I am very emotionally attached to it but at the same time I lead with the fiery anger rather than the deep sadness because the frustration and the anger is actually a really powerful way of pointing that emotion in the right direction.
“This is for all the women that have still never told anybody about their experience, or the women that died and nobody knew, or the women that were so poorly treated and their whole lives were defined by it.
“So I think even though it’s difficult I just go, ‘This is so not about me. This is so much bigger than me’.
“We were in Scotland and the amount of people that could relate to the story.
“I was just going like, ‘Wow, do you know?’
“And that makes it worth all of that strain.
“It’s incredible that way.”
You say the audience plays the role. Are there audible gasps or involuntary statements etc?
Is that very much part of it as well?
“It is.
“But also I do some audience interactions so the audience are actually part of it and I think people don’t expect that.
“When I was performing in Belfast I was backstage and I could hear the audience as they were coming in and this guy, who now I actually know so well, Professor Phil Scraton: I heard him when he sat down.
“He said, ‘We’ll sit in the front row because the only time you don’t sit in the front row is if it’s a pantomime or a comedy. It’s a drama, we’ll sit in the front row’.
“And the minute he sat in the front row, I was looking right at him and asking him questions and speaking to him so he regretted that straight away.
“But we don’t expect too much of the audience.
“They’re not having to get up on the stage or anything but I do interact with them and speak to them and expect an answer back.
“I think people don’t expect that with a serious play.
“But there are moments of lightness and fun in it because that’s how people cope with their trauma.
“These women didn’t just sit around miserable all the time.
“They had to get on with things.”
You say women have been written out of history in Ireland, have they also been denied a place in Irish drama. Don’t many great Irish plays lack a good part for a female?
“It’s really interesting.
“If you look at the Abbey Theatre which is our national theatre, it’s so wonderful and it’s great to see work there but they often play the canon which is the work that has been successful in Ireland over the last however many years.
“Normally they’re written by men and normally the male characters are the protagonist.
“I think there’s a big job to be done in Ireland in general, north and south about reassessing how we look at our canon and being critical of it.
“They’re wonderful plays. They are. They say such important things but we should maybe be a bit more critical and think, ‘What are they not saying?’
“Or, ‘What is happening there?’
“I think I’m always having an issue with the idea of our national theatres not producing enough female led work.
“It goes back to that idea of systemic historical patriarchal views that are always going to be prevalent if we don’t start shaking things up.”
Would you explore the story or subject matter more?
“Not at the moment.
“We’re still performing it which is amazing and as I said, I was doing creative writing classes with survivors, which was a really amazing opportunity.
“But for our company, for Wee Yarn Productions, we’re moving on to different work now.
“My partner, Cathal, is writing a piece about consent to do with violence against women and girls and he’s writing it from that male perspective.
“We want to take it into schools and talk to young boys about the importance of consent and how to behave with women.
“I’m also working on a piece at the minute with Professor Phil Scraton on how women are treated in prison.
“So we still have the theme of women and women’s rights in our work in the future.
“The Daughters of Róisin is what it is and that’s what we have to say on that.”
A lot of survivors came to the UK so you should get a poignant reaction at the ICC..
“We performed in the London Irish Centre a couple of years ago and we were blown away with the response from the London audience.
“We just could not believe it, the amount of not even just survivors but people who had family members that were sent to London and they followed and that’s why they now have their lives in London.
“The Irish diaspora there are so large in number and we were so warmly welcomed.
“We actually had to put out extra seats for our shows because there wasn’t enough room for the amount of people coming in which was incredible.
“It was just the most incredible experience and that’s why we were really eager to go back to London because we know that there are so many people that are impacted.
“I think sometimes the media might forget about how many people are there and are across the world and not just still in Ireland that are impacted.
“It’s really special for us to get to connect with them and to show them that we really care and that they matter.
“That’s really, really important to us.
“We’re really looking forward to it.”
The Daughters of Róisin is at The Irish Cultural Centre Friday 28 March- Sunday 30 March.
For tickets and more information, click here.
For more information about Wee Yarn Productions, click here.
