Several characters feature prominently in Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour, but only two appear onstage. We meet the protagonist, an Irish widow named Máire, as she is lying in bed on the morning of her 67th birthday, savoring a “fag”—a favorite term for cigarette across the pond, if you didn’t know—and confiding in an old friend about the night of rapture she has just enjoyed with a gentleman caller.
The friend, who does not physically materialize in the play, is Jesus Christ—or Máire’s Jesus, as she specifies early on, distinguishing the spiritual icon who has been her source of comfort since childhood from the one pressed on her by nuns at the convent where she spent six years after her mother died and her father departed for England. “Their Jesus,” explains Máire—played in Irish Repertory Theatre’s new production by a marvelous, shattering Marie Mullen—”seeped through the walls and watched…always watched…and judged…and ratted you out…and spotted your soul….and punished, condemned.”
Máire identifies the institution as “the convent in Stanhope Street,” ostensibly referring to St. Mary’s, one of the infamous “Magdalene Laundries” where girls and young women—orphans, prostitutes, those pregnant out of wedlock or destitute or simply unlucky—were essentially consigned to slave labor under the harshest, most punishing conditions, all in the same of preserving or restoring their virtue. These supposed havens operated as recently as the 1990s, when the discovery of more than 150 graves at one laundry led to media coverage and, eventually, numerous documentaries, and inspired fact-based accounts such as the 2013 film Philomena.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
In Saviour, Kinahan has crafted another testament to the enduring impact the moral hypocrisy and sheer cruelty practiced in the laundries had on the lives on those who suffered there. We learn that Máire was rescued from the horrors of Stanhope Street by a handsome young man, only to be relegated, after their romantic courtship and marriage, to a form of domestic drudgery that was less traumatic, save for the loss of two children.
The passion shared on the eve of her birthday, then, comes as an epiphany. “Gymnastic is what it was,” she confides to Jesus, hopeful He won’t disapprove; after all, she met the fellow, whose name is Martin—we don’t see him, either—in church, and initially thought their connection “purely spiritual because Martin is so devout.” But a visit from one of Máire’s grown kids, a son named Mel, carries a couple of twists that suggest the situation is more complicated—and that Máire’s Jesus, however compassionate or charitable, may have a troubling blind spot.
I’ll admit I found the tonal shifts that accompany this development a bit jarring. When Mullen’s Máire is alone with her invisible Son of God, her confessions and revelations tickle and sting; once her own son, played by an adroit and appealing Jamie O’Neill, enters the picture, their increasingly heated conversation is less tempered by levity, or wit. And those twists, while dramatically engaging, seem a bit contrived—the first in its sheer awfulness, the other in its conspicuous topicality. Aoife Kavanagh’s sound design, likewise, can be aggressively ominous, particularly as the play reaches its chilling conclusion.
But under Louise Lowe’s taut, sensitive direction, The Saviour, which clocks in at just seventy minutes, remains compelling right up to that point, when Máire suddenly finds herself unsure of her most constant companion’s support. “Jesus, where are you?” she asks. It’s something of a miracle, given the circumstances traced so hauntingly here, that it’s taken her this long to pose that question.
The Saviour opened July 13, 2023, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through August 13. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
