Summer might be coming to an end, but that means it's the perfect time to curl up on the sofa and binge a new TV drama. And the BBC’s chilling new psychological thriller, The Woman In The Wall, has got everyone talking.
Set in the fictional village of Kilkinure in Ireland, the six-part drama tells the story of Lorna Brady, played by Ruth Wilson, a chronic sleepwalker who wakes up one morning to find a dead body in her house. The series follows Lorna as she crosses paths with Detective Colman Akande, played by Daryl McCormack, who is investigating her for a crime that she is mysteriously connected to.
While the characters in the story are fictitious, the show is inspired by the true events of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, which have a dark history. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about these troubling institutions…
Is The Woman In The Wall based on a true story?
Not exactly, but the drama takes inspiration from the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, which were workhouses run by religious orders between the 1800s and the late 1900s. Lorna Brady is a fictional character but her flashbacks throughout the series shed light on the abuse that was suffered by women who were incarcerated in these institutions.
One example is the way that many women were forcibly separated from their children. In The Woman in the Wall, we see Lorna’s baby being taken away from her shortly after she has given birth in the laundry. While preparing for her role, Wilson researched the Magdalene Laundries and told the BBC she was ‘shocked’ to discover 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, its pure horror,’ she said.
In the drama, we also see a group of women campaigning to get the ‘convent’ they were kept in during adolescence to be officially recognised as a Magdalene laundry. While making the show, researchers spoke with Magdalene Laundry survivors, and a representative from Justice for Magdalenes, a volunteer organisation who worked to bring about the Irish state's official apology in 2013.
Joe Murtagh, the show's writer and creator, said that he couldn’t believe what he was reading when he came across the ‘real-life stories of the Magdalene Laundries,’ adding, ‘primarily, I was inspired to do this just by a sense of outrage, I guess you'd call it. And I wanted to do it in a very particular kind of way where, because it was so unknown, I wanted to kind of cast the net wide, and get the story out there to as wide an audience as possible.’
What were the Magdalene Laundries?
The Magdalene Laundries – named after the saint Mary Magdalene - were institutions run by Catholic nuns to house ‘fallen women’ in Ireland. This umbrella term included unmarried mothers, sex workers and women deemed to have been promiscuous or sexually abused. An estimated 30,000 women are believed to have been confined to the laundries in Ireland during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The women were expected to do gruelling physical labour for long hours and no pay. Most famously, this included commercial laundry and domestic tasks such as scrubbing the floor. While the Magdalene laundries were almost entirely run by Catholic nuns, the Irish government helped pay for them in exchange for these laundry services.
The average age of women in the laundries was 23, with some reports saying that the youngest admission was nine years old. Many of the women stayed in the institutions for life. Once admitted, women and girls weren’t allowed to speak to each other or have contact with the outside world. They also had their names changed, their hair cut on entry and wore a uniform.
Alongside the unpaid physical labour, the women suffered mental and physical abuse and malnourishment, which the nun’s justified as penance for their sins. There were also shocking levels of infant mortality and disease thanks to the terrible living conditions.
When did the Magdalene Laundries close?
Despite the horror of these institutions, they continued to operate until as recently as 1996 when the last Magdalene Laundry closed in Waterford.
The institutions were first hit by scandal in 1993, when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a former Dublin laundry to a property developer. After the sale, they discovered a mass grave of 155 women, some of which had not been declared dead to the state. In 2013, the Irish Government finally issued an official apology on behalf of the state for its role in the Magdalene Laundries.
The institutions made headlines again after Sinead O’Connor’s death in July this year. The singer spent one year in a Magdalene Laundry when she was 14 and spoke openly about the abuse she suffered. ‘It was a prison. We didn’t see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood,' she said in an interview with Irish Central in 1993. 'We were told we were there because we were bad people. Some of the girls had been raped at home and not believed.’
How do I watch The Woman In The Wall?
The drama premiered on BBC1 on Sunday 27 August at 9pm, and the second episode aired on Monday 28 August at 9pm. The show will then run weekly on Sundays at 9pm. The first two episodes are available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
Who is in the cast of The Woman In The Wall?
Ruth Wilson, who starred in His Dark Materials, Luther and The Affair, plays the lead character Lorna Brady. Lorna is a former victim of the Magdalene Laundries who lives in the fictional Irish town Kilkinure. She crosses paths with detective Colman Akande, who is played by Daryl McCormack. You might recognise him from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and the Irish soap opera Fair City.
Niamh, a woman campaigning for justice on behalf of the women impacted by the laundries, is played by Motherland star Phillipa Dunne, while Simon Delaney plays Aidan Massey, a Sergeant at the local police force. Helen Roche, Anne Kent, Abby Fitz and Cillian Lenaghan are also among the stars.
How many episodes of The Woman In The Wall are there?
There are six episodes of The Woman In The Wall in total. The next episode will air on Sunday 2 September at 9pm, and be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from 9.05pm.