Ruth Wilson on The Woman in the Wall and Ireland’s Magdalene laundries: ‘These women need to be heard’

The past has all the clues to the present,” says Ruth Wilson, eyes roving around my computer screen over Zoom. “Women’s bodies have been controlled by political states or religions for time immemorial. The past is painful. But if we don’t revisit it, then we will make the same mistakes. And it’s bound to happen again.”

The “it” to which Wilson is referring is the Magdalene laundries scandal, which saw at least 30,000 women incarcerated in institutions run by the Catholic Church across Ireland between 1922 and 1996. With women and girls imprisoned on the basis of being unmarried or having children outside of marriage and their babies confiscated by nuns, it’s a story as horrifying as it is devastating. And yet, much of it remains shrouded in secrecy today.

That is something Wilson, star of Luther, The Affair and His Dark Materials, hopes to change in her latest TV show, The Woman in the Wall, which takes one of Ireland’s most shocking scandals and turns it into a gripping crime drama-meets-psychological horror. Written and created by Joe Murtagh (who co-wrote the 2019 film Calm with Horses, which received four Bafta nominations), the series stars Wilson as Lorna Brady, a survivor of the laundries who has suffered from sleepwalking ever since being imprisoned in a mother and baby home (institutions run alongside laundries specifically for unmarried mothers), where she gave birth to a daughter at the age of 15 only to never see her again.

Set in rural Ireland in 2015, the series begins with Lorna waking up one morning to find a corpse in her house. Soon, a detective (played by Daryl McCormack, of Peaky Blinders and Bad Sisters) is on her tail in pursuit of answers, and secrets begin to unfurl from both sides, shedding light on the chilling reality of what happened in the Magdalene laundries, and the lifelong consequences for those involved.

It’s a gripping yet shocking series of events, with Wilson excelling in her role as the town’s resident “oddball”, as the actor calls her, and McCormack as the high-flying but underestimated newbie Dublin detective whom one character compares to a member of the Backstreet Boys. (“He has a lot more emotional depth than it seems”, McCormack says.) At its heart, though, is a story based on real-life experiences, the darkness of which transcends that of any TV drama.

For Murtagh, who grew up in Britain to Irish parents and only learned about the laundries thanks to Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, it’s a project that has been 10 years in the making. “Anyone I spoke to outside of Ireland about this had no idea what it was,” he says. “After watching that film, I went down a rabbit hole of research and found this massive paradox between the scale of what happened and the thousands of lives this touched versus how few people know about it. It was something I just couldn’t wrap my head around.”

Murtagh began reading as many accounts from survivors as he could find, enlisting the help of researcher and activist Katherine O’Donnell, who is a member of the Justice for Magdalenes Research group and also co-author of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice. He also spoke to survivors directly. “You’re expecting a different kind of person,” he recalls. “But I was happily surprised to find them so open to talking to us about this; they wanted us to get this story out there. It was really refreshing and gave me the full green light to do it.”

That’s not to say there weren’t reservations. “There was always a really strong argument for me not to tell this story,” Murtagh adds, noting how both his gender and his English accent don’t exactly present him as someone connected to the laundries. “But then I thought, well, no one knows about this story, and relatively few people are telling it, so even though I potentially don’t have a right to do that, and it might upset a few people, that’s also playing into the hands of people who don’t want this story to get out there, and I couldn’t quite square that.”

In 2023, details are still emerging about the laundries. Established in the 1820s, they were initially used to lock up sex workers, to keep them away from the colonial British army. But since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, the institutions, under the control of the Catholic Church, became even more carceral and punitive. By the 1940s, most of the women incarcerated there were those who’d had sex outside of marriage, unmarried mothers, or women who were deemed in any way promiscuous. Some were rape victims. The Magdalene women endured mental, physical and sexual abuse, with many of them dying within the convent walls.

For years, these institutions operated somewhat secretly. It wasn’t until 1993, when the bodies of 155 women were exhumed from unmarked graves near the Donnybrook laundry in Dublin, that details began to emerge publicly. Since then, more shocking discoveries have been made, like the children’s mass grave discovered in Tuam, County Galway, in 2014.

After a state apology was made by the Irish government in 2013 for its part in the detention of women in the Magdalene laundries, a commission was appointed in 2015 to investigate Mother and Baby Homes, and a report was submitted in 2020.

Progress has also been made in investigating what happened in mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries in Northern Ireland, although up to now it has been slow. Following the publication of an independent report in 2021 – “Truth Acknowledgement and Accountability” – the devolved government accepted all recommendations, most significantly the appointment of a panel comprising victims/survivors, and specialists with relevant expertise, to take evidence from mothers and children born in the homes. Their work is underway and the information gathered, alongside the findings of the initial independent report, will inform the whole public, statutory inquiry when it is eventually appointed.

“When you’re really exploring this stuff, it’s like you want to rescue them from the past,” says McCormack, who grew up in Nenagh, County Tipperary, and had only vaguely known about the laundries before taking on the role. “You almost yearn for justice, there’s a real sense of young women’s lives being stolen from them that I found really discomforting.” For Wilson, it’s essential that their experiences are validated. “These women need their voices to be heard,” she says. “They want it to be recognised as something that happened and something that was wrong.”

Neither McCormack nor Wilson considers themselves to be particularly religious, while Murtagh describes himself as “agnostic at best”. “I think everyone knows what the Catholic Church is, and this is a particularly horrific part of their history,” says Murtagh. “You just type ‘catholic church’ and put the name of any country behind that and you’ll find unfortunately some similarly horrific things.”

For Wilson, though, the relationship is somewhat different given she was raised Catholic. “I found it difficult when I was about 16,” she recalls. “I would listen to the sermons, and some of the teachings in them I just couldn’t bear. I started getting really angry. I think one was about abortion or contraception, and I remember walking out of the church, absolutely furious.” That said, she understands people’s connection to the Church; her father still goes every week. “For him, it’s this community, and it’s meditative,” she says.

While the religious aspect may not appeal, the theatrical element certainly does; Wilson was an altar girl in her local church and has previously said the experience helped form her initial understanding of drama and performance. “I sometimes think of a character arc in terms of sin, consequences and redemption,” she explains. “It’s in the Catholic language and sometimes that’s how I pitch a story in my head. I think it stimulates the senses; there’s iconography, colours, outfits, smells, there are candles… there’s all these rituals. It’s so theatrical, the idea of transforming wine to blood, I mean, that’s weird. And the bread into the body of Christ. It’s quite sexual, actually,” she laughs. “I mean, it’s quite sensual to me. It’s intense. It’s really intense.”

It’s an intensity that lends itself to Wilson’s character’s journey in The Woman in the Wall. “Lorna was a mother but has never experienced mothering because her child was taken away the moment it was born,” she says. “It’s almost like, did it ever exist? I think that’s a really, really f***ed up thing to have to deal with.”

There were lighter aspects to what went into Wilson’s research for the character, though, such as Lorna’s sleepwalking. “I found loads of videos of people who record themselves sleepwalking,” says Wilson, referencing one woman who walks “like an adult baby”, putting food in her pants and throwing things out of windows. “It’s hilarious and terrifying. And then I spoke to Harry [Wootliff], one of our directors, whose partner sleepwalks. So she was telling me how he is and I thought, ‘oh, okay, we can have fun with this.’”

Murtagh’s show is not a straightforward drama. “That would immediately limit the number of people that might see it,” he says. “Blending the thriller element with gothic and horror became the most appropriate way to tell the story. Because there’s a lot of people who have no interest, or don’t know enough to be interested, in the laundries. But they might be interested in a murder mystery.” 

Murtagh hopes that the show will not only raise awareness of the laundries but also help drive action, whether that’s by giving survivors a voice or simply validating what happened to them and subsequently creating a modicum of justice where, of course, there is little to be found. “The thing that makes this story particularly horrific is the very unique silence around it compared to, say, the issues explored in a film like Spotlight,” he says, referring to the Oscar-winning 2015 film that dramatised the investigation into widespread sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests.

As for what’s keeping this story under wraps, Murtagh says everyone he has spoken to has a different answer. “The common thread between them all is shame,” he says. “And there’s a particular kind of Irish Catholic shame and there were people going out of their way to attribute that shame to these women and that is an incredibly powerful thing and it’s persistent.”

Think about the reasons why some women were incarcerated in the laundries in the first place, though, and another reason comes to light. They would be enslaved if they were considered “fallen women”, a definition applied to anyone who had sex outside of marriage or was deemed in any way promiscuous or flirtatious. The silence around the laundries is not just about Irish Catholic shame; it’s about the shame we attach to sex, and specifically to female sexuality.

“For some reason, the moment of conception is considered sinful,” offers Wilson. “What gives life is also considered the doom of humans. And women are often the ones placed at the centre of that, which is very odd to me.” She pauses. “If only we could get past the taboo of what sex is; people would enjoy it more, I’m sure. Also, we’d just have less hang-ups about it. And there’d be less control over bodies. It’s not just in our country, it’s across the globe. So there must be something deeply powerful and frightening about it to some people.”

‘The Woman in the Wall’ premieres on BBC One and iPlayer at 9.05pm on Sunday 27 August