The Asylum Workshop

by Colin Murphy

You think this is dignified? A bunch of students playing with someone's medical records?Why did 20th century Ireland lock up so many people? After all the scandals about Ireland's institutions - the industrial schools, the mother and baby homes, the Magdalene laundries - why have we still barely investigated the largest institutions of them the psychiatric hospitals?Today, Grangegorman is home to the newly opened campus of Technological University Dublin. But for nearly 200 years, it housed a forbidding institution behind high walls.The Asylum Workshop is a new documentary play by Colin Murphy about the history of Ireland's first public psychiatric hospital. Drawing on unique access to the hospital's archives, it weaves together verbatim testimony from patients and families, reports from doctors and nurses, and analysis from historians and psychiatrists.This edition is published to coincide with the production by Technological University Dublin and Grangegorman Histories in the East Quad Black Box Theatre in June 2023.

141 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 26, 2023

About the author

Colin Murphy is the author of The Most Famous Irish People You’ve Never Heard Of and co-author of the bestselling ‘Feckin’ collection (The O’Brien Press). His début historical novel Boycott (Brandon) was published in 2012 to great acclaim.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this docudrama is intriguing, but unfortunately, it is so bound up by the specifics of the institution in which it was devised and performed, that is has little relevance for a general audience. Still, it has its moments.

https://www.thereviewshub.com/asylum-...