In Plain Sight
Sacred Heart of Mary Convent, Roscrea
****
Telling stories of trauma is always fraught. But perhaps the harder task lies in telling the ones we think we already know. The history of Ireland’s mother and baby homes sits heavily in the national consciousness, and its impact is vast, reverberating down the generations. Everyone has a mental image, and that’s precisely the danger. Familiarity dulls the edges. Sentimentality seeps in. The story risks becoming too legible, the unsafe material flattened into a familiar plot.
In Plain Sight, a new work by Noelle Brown and Camille O’Sullivan, understands this problem and sidesteps it gracefully. Staged not in a theatre but in a former convent, it avoids the expectations of dramatic spectacle. There’s no stage, no blackout, no clear boundary between performance and audience. Instead: rows of folding chairs facing inward, like a support group; a long table laid with white architectural maquettes, teacups and document boxes; tea and biscuits served after. It feels less like a play than a seminar, a vigil or a community gathering. The tone is serious but never leaden.
The work takes architecture as its entry point. O’Sullivan, a trained architect as well as performer, opens the piece like a guide giving a tour. Later, she speaks of the houses where the institutions were sited: grand 18th-century mansions built to Enlightenment ideals, structured by the golden ratio, that same proportion found in flowers and seashells.
Outside: symmetry, order, beauty. Inside: secrecy, injustice, pain. The visual and ethical dissonance becomes the conceptual heart of the piece. Space, we’re reminded, can hold memory. It can contain and conceal violence.
Piers Morgan: ‘My DNA is predominantly Irish whether Ireland wants that or not’
Allen Bobinac: ‘For four weeks, I was sleeping in Stephen’s Green, surviving on €1 a day’
‘Dún Laoghaire is a place of such contrasts - it has yacht clubs and sunshine, but also a darker side’
Golfer Leona Maguire: ‘We came from a modest background. I don’t need a lot of money to keep me happy’
The performance shifts between modes: guided reflection, documentary theatre, archival reading, song. Early on the audience is asked to recall rooms that meant something to them and to write down those memories. Later, witness statements are played. Bureaucratic records are quoted.
The play avoids any literal re-enactment of abuse. Instead, it adopts something like the Claude Lanzmann approach, evoking trauma through negative space and small factual details that hint at the unspeakable. One of the most disturbing of these involves financial records: infant bath sizes reduced to cut costs, while top-grade Japanese oak with a French finish was ordered for the nuns’ quarters. Another is the designation of a “screaming room,” where women were isolated for crying out during labour. It’s through these specific, architectural details that the play offers new, chilling glimpses into the lives that passed through these spaces.
O’Sullivan’s musical interludes are bewitching, delivered with gravitas and tenderness. Brown is sincere, incisive, unsentimental. Her account of navigating the State’s redress systems makes real the continuing and widespread nature of this injustice, and how little has been done to fully admit or address it.
After the show, over tea and biscuits, I spoke with audience members who had direct family histories tied to the institutions. This, ultimately, is the achievement of In Plain Sight: not just finding new ways to present information or tell a difficult story, but making space for conversations that still haven’t happened.
In Plain Sight, staged by Once Off Productions, is at Sacred Heart of Mary Convent, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, until Saturday, July 12th
