BAGLADY IS a rarely performed play from one of Ireland’s leading playwrights, Frank McGuinness. It has not been seen on an Irish stage for 25 years but its story is as relevant now as when it was first written.
The play comes to the Town Hall Studio next week in a welcome new production featuring Maria McDermottroe in the title role.
Baglady is a touching and revealing drama on how a woman becomes alienated from life: the eponymous Baglady of the title is a gentle woman whose life has been destroyed by shocking violence. The play explores the conditions and circumstances which caused her to become alienated from society and gradually reveals the terrifying events which shaped her life.
One of the most remarkable aspects of McGuinness’s play is its ability to implicate an entire society while focusing on a lone soul torn asunder by an act of familial violation. The resonances with widespread allegations of systemic child abuse within Irish society as a whole are unmistakable here.
Baglady’s fraught attempts to exorcise her troubled past also holds a mirror up to the ongoing debate about how Ireland can best come to terms with its own history.
Baglady is a play that McDermottroe, last seen in the Town Hall in Max Hafler’s production of The Glass Menagerie, has wanted to do for quite a while, as she discloses ahead of its Galway visit.
“I first had the idea a few years ago of doing the show,” she says. “I really love the writing; it’s very strong. I just wanted to do it. So last year I got together with director Caroline Fitzgerald who I’ve worked with many times before and we put it on at the Focus Theatre. The response and feedback the show got was brilliant which is what led to it being brought back for this tour.”
McDermottroe goes on to share her thoughts on the character of the nameless and homeless Baglady.
“She is a countrywoman who is lost and reduced by the circumstances of her life,” she says. “You can see these sort of marginalised people all the time and I am always aware when I do that there is a history there. This is someone’s daughter, spouse, or parent. They have lost everything but they keep going. I think the play is maybe more relevant today than when it was first performed back in the eighties, it shouldn’t be but it is.”
McDermottroe is a seasoned stage and screen actor whose credits include appearances on the Abbey and Gaiety stages as well as roles in Veronica Guerin, Angela’s Ashes, and John Huston’s The Dead, as well as featuring as Mrs Gilhooley in Killinascully. Given her long acting experience it is somewhat surprising to learn that Baglady is the first solo show she has done.
“You’re in at the deep end with a monologue, you’re totally on your own,” she observes, “but the play is such a rich tapestry that it’s a very exciting journey, both frightening and fulfilling. I find that once the play starts, the process goes really quickly, once you launch off you don’t feel the time going until it finishes and that’s something that only happens with good plays.”
Baglady runs at the Town Hall studio from Tuesday September 27 to Saturday October 1 at 7.30pm nightly. Tickets are €13/11 from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
