Review: The Marian Hotel

I didn’t expect to be quite so moved by Caitriona Cunningham’s The Marian Hotel which I saw in dress rehearsal. I should have been, though, as this tale of young, unmarried pregnant women battling the stern Catholic church in a home with a regime designed to remind them of their sin surely tugs at the heartstrings. You won’t easily forget Sarah’s howl of agony as she realises her new born baby daughter “with a mop of hair” has in effect been snatched from her, albeit for adoption to a presumably good home. Nobody even consulted her and Cunningham has based this telling drama on her own experience of being an unmarried mother in a Newry hostel. Shannon Wilkinson is superb in the role.

But we start with Catherine (Aoibh Johnson), the author’s younger self, arriving at her new billet which is nothing but stifling rules and regulations, provided to underline the one rule these young women forgot. Significantly, she’s asked to choose a new name, a depersonalising act which sums up the regime. So Kitty, after her grandmother, joins the mainly fag smoking, agin the government girls who have lost their freedom after getting unlucky in the biological lottery of reproduction. Sarah is brilliant as the pro-Ira (“There’s a war on” she tells the Protestant mum to be Caroline), feisty girl whose boyfriend doesn’t really want fatherhood. All the actors excel, so too Kitty whose incomprehension at some of the nuns’ casual cruelty speaks volumes. The scene where she confides her fear of impending childbirth is moving. Rachel Harley as Ellen, the child, the most shocking case study of all, is a study in a kind of innocence. And Roma Harvey’s Sinead, the young widow with another child on the way she can’t keep, is also outstanding.

At times the humour is a bit Derry Girls, which is of course a big compliment. There is a scene where the young women let their hair down and dance, treating their unborn babies to a jive session. It was joyful and of course, bittersweet, broken up by the stern nun.

My only minute criticism of the play, which shines, is the adopted grown up female character’s explanation of what we’ve just seen at the end. In truth, her story is also affecting but less direct and theatrically effective somehow. Jackie becomes a mother and wants to find her birth mother, then sums up the play we’ve experienced. This tiny speech took us out of the drama and isn’t needed.

Having said that, The Marian Hotel is oddly life-enhancing and an important work, emerging as an enquiry is sitting into some of the activity of these lamentable mother and baby homes. Issue drama can work when as heartfelt as this. Patricia Byrne directed well for Sole Purpose, Robert Attewell’s set showing that other virtually unmarried mother the Virgin Mary staring serenely down as a figurine stage left was impressive. As the young women carried their burden washing endless sheets as a kind of symbol of the cleansing the Church felt they needed, we felt the pain. At one point, one of the mothers talks about how a priest fathered a child, underlining the double standards that prevailed back in the day. Happily, now some things have changed but the resume of these real women’s lives showed the dark shadow cast by the Marian hotels, with some mothers never meeting up with their lost children.

Jane Hardy

The Marian Hotel tours to Newry, Derry and Belfast.