Have brutal nuns turned Ruth Wilson’s ‘fallen woman’ into a vengeful killer?
Ireland’s shameful ‘Magdalene Laundries’ are at the heart of this dark psychological thriller. The Laundries were workhouses run by Roman Catholic orders to which ‘fallen women’ would be taken. A fallen woman could be a rape victim, an abused child, an unmarried mother or a girl considered too flirtatious or even too beautiful.
Thousands of women passed through these secretive establishments. Many inmates – and they were effectively prisoners – were brutalised by the nuns who ran them and were traumatised by the experience. Sounds like something from the bad old days, right?
Yet, as a former inmate angrily points out in the first episode of this six-parter: ‘People think that this couldn’t happen again and then they forget that the last laundry closed in 1996. It wasn’t medieval times. The f ****** Macarena was in the charts.’ The drama opens in 2015 when the laundries are in the news because of an official inquiry into them.
Ruth Wilson plays Lorna Brady, a woman who was incarcerated in a laundry as a teenager. Her baby was taken from her by a nun (Alexandra Moloney, right) without her consent, as was common in these places, and she has been prone to sleepwalking since. She has no idea what she does while she’s in these trance states.
Lorna wakes up in the middle of a country road after another somnambulistic episode and makes her way back to her house in the fictional coastal town of Kilkinure in western Ireland. She’s shocked to find a carving knife embedded in a painting of Jesus on her wall.
‘That’s not good,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Jesus.’ As it turns out, that’s the least of her worries.
Detective sergeant Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) is investigating the murder in Dublin of a priest, a figure from Lorna’s past. The victim’s car has been dumped in Kilkinure. Akande’s inquiries suggest that Lorna might be a person of interest.
The local garda sergeant (Simon
Delaney, excellent), is sceptical. ‘She’s not right in the head,’ he says. ‘Lorna’s harmless.’ But is she?
She has a record after desecrating a shrine to the Virgin Mary with an axe. Might she be capable of much worse?
There’s little that award-winning actress Wilson can’t do but some of her most memorable characters are very damaged women. Mrs Coulter in His Dark Materials, for example, or Dr Alice Morgan in Luther. Now we can add Lorna Brady to the list.
The Woman In The Wall manages to blend powerful drama with some laugh-out-loud funny moments. It is going to be much talked about.