Theatre: Review of ‘Skinners’

Artane Industrial School

Theatre Review: ‘Skinners’ by Michael F. Kennedy

February 10^th 2010, Teachers Club Theatre, 36 Parnell Square West, Dublin 1

As venues go for tales of Ireland’s dark association with the taboo of child abuse, they don’t come more grimly appropriate than the Teachers Club Theatre on Parnell Square. A compact subterranean space in the shadow of Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, hidden out of sight below street level, it was in many ways the most fitting space in which to unfold a story which, for far too long, had been kept out of sight, and locked into the dark, silent basement of the nation’s soul. Company D, a small independent company of actors, took on as their latest challenge the bringing to life of Michael F. Kennedy’s ‘Skinners’: the true story of one man’s sufferings at the hands of Church and State. Sitting in the corridor awaiting entry to the theatre, an air of quiet predominated. On the walls were black and white reprints of national daily front pages from May 2009, the day after the release of the Ryan Report, documenting the damning findings of systemic abuse, hardship, rape and violence against children.

Presenting itself as ‘one man’s story of child abuse in Ireland’s Industrial School system, one man’s struggle for justice’, the play is one as much about present injustice as past. Scenes juxtapose frequently between the adult protagonist, Michael Cleere, contesting his appeal hearing before a skeptical Residential Institutions Redress Board, and flashbacks to his child-self as a nine-year old boy subjected to neglect, bullying and physical cruelty at the hands of Rosminian Brothers. The transition often falls short of being seamless, but the point emerges nonetheless clearly: the past is not a foreign country, to paraphrase L.P. Hartley, and they do not do things all that differently there.

The play opens with three boys, skinny and pale, playing a game with stones. The scene presents itself as harmless at first sight, until the casual chatter reveals the prize at stake: food, with slices of bread – known in boyish vernacular as ‘skinners’ – the currency. Later on, we learn that such meagre portions formed two entire meals in the boys’ day: two slices of brittle bread stuck together with dripping. Dressed in patchwork and ill-fitting jumpers and shorts, the eldest boy – a red-haired bully who often threatens to ‘burst’ the others – informs us with a wry smile that this was the game played by the Roman soldiers on Golgotha as they drew lots for Christ’s clothing. The reference was instantly powerful: at the summit of death and despair, people will still squabble over dividing the half-pence from the pence. The more persistent meaning, of course, was to emerge as the play developed: the Rosminians are the Romans, the children are the Christs, flogged at the pillar, despised and rejected of men, little men of sorrows.  The significance of these scenes summoned forth echoes of the Ryan Report, particularly the testimony of Fr Luca, a resident Manager of the infamous Daingean Industrial School: “I was there saying my office in the evening and I heard the leather being used on some boy at that time. I thought it was a most revolting thing and said here am I inside to praise God and Christ himself is being punished now right beside me.”

Michael Cleere, the writer’s onstage persona, arrives at the school in his Sunday best, a 9 year old from the benign St Michael’s Convent. He is quickly divested of his fine clothing by the boys, who scarper when the fearsome Br Cronnell enters the scene. He is powerfully played by Michael Hough, whose striding bulk, bulging eyes and booming voice made frightened children of us all. The boy is quickly subjected to a ferocious beating for the ‘crimes’ of not being properly attired and not knowing his number, and this sets in motion a rotating narrative switching between Michael’s past sufferings of capricious abuse and present wranglings with State bureaucracy, with Hough switching persona from thundering Rosminian to obfuscating judge.

Indeed, the play is one of constant juxtaposition, switching regularly between the heated exchanges of the Redress Board hearing room to the static terror of Michael’s flashbacks to his schooldays. Jonathan Williamson plays the smug Board barrister with convincing smarminess, before later morphing into the cunning Fr Quill, who liked to play Mozart on his violin after subjecting Michael to a ferocious kicking. This thread of persecution runs constantly through the piece. The costume-change sequences are occasionally clunky, but the dead-eyed stare into the audience of the priest-becoming-judge leaves nothing to doubt: the State, in its interrogation, condescension and disbelief of the survivors, is merely continuing the torment started by the Church. Same institutional abusers, different clothes.

Cleere, we are informed by his solicitor, is a ‘Renaissance man’ – lacking in formal education but possessing of a vast range of self-taught literary and artistic knowledge. Indeed, Cleere’s familiarity with the literary-historic world is pushed with no small degree of enthusiasm throughout his series of emotional and eloquent soliloquys before the Board. Oliver Twist, fittingly enough, is cited in passing, with Mr Bumble’s famous cry that ‘the law is an ass’ echoed to castigate the Board’s workings, while one of the younger boys quips at mealtime that “at least Oliver was allowed ask for more”. There are repeated comparisons of Industrial Schools to Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps – a common but contentious practise – with Primo Levi’s ‘If This Be A Man’ cited regularly. Cleere at one point expounds on the LeBon principle, also known as the Goebbelian principle after Hitler’s propaganda minister: that an untruth repeated often enough becomes true. Orwell, Dickens, LeBon, Levi… all very good, but the manner in which great writers are name-dropped – ostensibly to dispel any notion that Cleere is in some way made ignorant or coarsened by his experiences – ultimately begins to jar. His ranting at the Board members is clearly possessing of purpose – he frequently highlights the fact that the Board’s claim to act for justice is compromised by virtue of being an arm of the same State that committed him to the Institution as a criminal – but ends up coming across as a didactic lecture rather than a theatrical monologue.

It is uncomfortable casting the reviewer’s critical eye over a story that is true, raw and rooted in another human being’s firsthand experience of abuse and cruelty. In many ways, this is not just another piece of theatre to be dissected and analysed like any other. For all that is made of

'Skinners' by Michael F. Kennedy

Church and Government apologies, it is the artistic response to the Ryan Report which will be the most important of all as regards how this country comes to terms with the scars on its psyche. Michael F. Kennedy’s play is one of a small number of survivors’ stories transposed to stage. ‘The Darkest Corner: No Escape’, a special series of plays responding to the Ryan Report, is to be staged at The Abbey in April, and such contributions will be vital in making sense of the scandal at a soulful level. At a time when church leaders have squandered all moral authority, it is art that stands the best chance of offering vision, guidance and insight. Kennedy’s play forms the latest part of this fabric of meaning, and is to be welcomed as such. While sparse in terms of theatrical devices and possessing more in the way of documentary evidence than pathos and drama, ‘Skinners’ above all represents one man’s voice. It is a voice of outrage and pride, of humiliation and dignity, of boy and man. It stands as its own monument to the experience of Michael F. Kennedy and sounds, as the memorial at Auschwitz, as ‘a cry of despair and a warning to humanity’. Writing this play was perhaps Kennedy’s only means of communicating his story free from the contorting filters of media, spokespeople and redacted comment, and it is an opportunity which he grasped with both hands. For that, it is a significant and valuable work, professionally performed and humbly received.

2010

02/24

CATEGORY

Religion
Theatre

TAGS

child abuse
Company D
Industrial Schools
Michael F. Kennedy
Residential Institutions Redress Board
Rosminians
Skinners
Teachers Club Theatre

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