About this event:

Fragments from the archive of the institution once known as the "Lunatic Asylum", Grangegorman

A documentary drama by Colin Murphy with the final-year Drama students of the TU Dublin Conservatoire

Why did Ireland historically have a hugely disproportionate number of institutionalised psychiatric patients compared to other countries globally?

How do we confront a difficult past that took place all around us as we try to forge a new future?

The Asylum Workshop is a new documentary play by playwright Colin Murphy (The Treaty, A Day in May, Inside the GPO, Bailed Out!) about the history of the Grangegorman mental hospital in Dublin’s north inner city.

Grangegorman is now home to the beautiful, open campus of the new Technological University Dublin.  Yet, for nearly 200 years, it was a formidable institution behind stone walls: an aspirational place of asylum and the treatment of mental illness, but also a place of medical mistreatment and traumatic incarceration.

Drawing on unique access to the hospital archives, The Asylum Workshop weaves together verbatim letters and testaments from patients and families, reports from doctors and nurses, and expert analysis from historians and psychiatrists.  Murphy frames these materials as questions about the relationship between the hospital and Irish society’s values and priorities in the 20th century.

Written for the current final-year students of the B.A. (Hons) in Drama (Performance) at TU Dublin Conservatoire, the play also juxtaposes the site’s complicated past as a hospital treating mental illness and its present incarnation as a university pursuing knowledge.

Don’t miss this special event by Ireland’s foremost writer of documentary theatre.

“Colin Murphy does a terrific job in using documentary material to maximum dramatic effect.” (The Irish Times on Bailed Out!)

“A powerful play about a triumph of civil and human rights . . . A play that everyone in Ireland should have gone to see . . . Brilliant” (Sunday Independent on A Day in May)