Captivating actress stars in a brand new grimming drama called , leading the cast as a woman from Ireland called Lorna Brady.
Lorna’s life has been heavily impacted by her experiences from her teen years, when she was made to live and work in the horrific conditions of a Magdalene Laundry.
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande actor joins her in the cast as Detective Colman Akande, who is investigating Lorna for a crime that she is somehow connected to.
While the story told in The Woman in the Wall is fictitious, the tales of the thousands of women who suffered in Magdalene Laundries for decades are steeped in shocking truth.
So what is The Woman in the Wall about, and what is the true story of the Magdalene Laundries? Here’s what you need to know.
What happened in the Magdalene Laundries?
While the true story of the Magdalene Laundries might sound like facts straight out of history books, the institutions continued to operate until as recently as 1996.
For decades, women and girls in Ireland were made to carry out unpaid labour, having been subjected to that way of life for a number of reasons, including because they were deemed ‘promiscuous’ by society, were unmarried mothers, had been sexually abused or were considered a burden by their families.
Some of the women and girls stayed in the institutions for life, where their lives were monitored under the strict rule of nuns, who were said to serve severe punishments for indiscretions.
While the reality of the Magdalene Laundries was largely kept a secret for a long time, in 1992, the Scan**l was unearthed when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of their land in Dublin to pay off debts.
At the cemetery in Donnybrook, a mass grave of 155 undocumented women was found, and more women began to speak out to share their experiences.
The final building of the last laundry in Ireland closed in 1996, with a formal state apology given in 2013. A compensation scheme was also set up for survivors by the Irish Government. It’s estimated that around 30,000 women were confined in the laundries over decades.
, a not-for-profit organisation set up in 2003 to seek an official apology from the Irish State and a compensation scheme for survivors, states on its website: ‘Although the State was not directly involved in incarcerating these women and girls, it failed to protect and defend their individual liberty and human rights, as they had a right to expect in a democratic State governed by the rule of law.’
They continue: ‘The girls and women were forced to work from morning until evening – washing, ironing or packing laundry, and sewing, embroidering or doing other manual labour. These Laundries were run on a commercial, for-profit basis, but the girls and women received no pay.’
Marina Gambold, a woman who was taken to a laundry when she was 16 a couple of years after she was orphaned, told the in 2013 how she was made to eat food off the floor when she broke a cup.
After claiming that her stepfather was abusing her, Maureen Sullivan was sent to a laundry when she was 12, where she was given a new name and allegedly forced to work night and day.
‘What an evil thing to do. I never did any wrong. I was an innocent child and a nun told me I could trust her to tell her my story. I trusted her and what a fool I was. I mean when you look back now,’ she told the broadcaster.
What is The Woman in the Wall about?
In The Woman in the Wall, Lorna makes a terrifying discovery one day when she wakes up in the small, fictional Irish town of Kilkinure – a mysterious corpse in her house.
Lorna has no idea who the woman is or whether she played any part in her death, because she has suffered from sleepwalking seen her teenage years, when she was sent to live in Kilkinure Convent.
While in the laundry, Lorna gave birth to her daughter Agnes, who was ripped from her.
Meanwhile, Detective Colman Akande is investigating Lorna for another crime that she apparently has some connection to, which doesn’t appear to be about the dead body.
Having conducted research for the role, Ruth told the how ‘shocked’ she was to find out that in some cases of girls giving birth in the laundries, ‘they’d have to nurse their child for two years, and then their child was taken away from them’.
‘Stuff like that is horrific; the fact that girls weren’t given any gas and air or weren’t stitched up after birth. The nuns wouldn’t let them. Things like that, you just go, wow, it’s pure horror,’ she said.
Creator and writer Joe Murtagh added: ‘Outside of Ireland, in my experience, this isn’t really known about, and with the people who do tend to know about it, it’s because they’ve seen films including the Magdalene Sisters or Philomena.
‘When you read into it, you see how harrowing it was, the scale of it, and how many tens of thousands of lives it’s touched. It was a bit of history that interested me and engaged me emotionally, but the driving factor was just people not knowing about it enough.’
The Woman in the Wall begins tonight at 9.05pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
