The Asylum Workshop

You think this is dignified? A bunch of students playing with someone’s medical records?

Why did twentieth-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 all: the psychiatric hospitals?

Today, Grangegorman is home to the open new 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.

Colin Murphy writes plays about politics, and journalism. He is the author of a series of plays on Irish political history: Haughey/Gregory, on the 1982 ＂Gregory Deal＂, Inside the GPO, on the Easter Rising, Guaranteed!, on the bank guarantee of 2008, and Bailed Out!, on the subsequent crisis and Troika ＂bailout＂ of 2010, all produced by Fishamble. He adapted the latter two for screen, as The Guarantee and The Bailout (both produced by John Kelleher Media). He adapted the Charlie Bird book A Day in May for the stage. His verbatim dramas, Jack Duggan’s War and Judging Shaw (based on Fintan O’Toole’s book of the same name) have been staged by ANU Productions. His short film Leave to Remain was made for RTÉ Storyland (produced by Treasure Entertainment). He writes a weekly column for the Sunday Business Post.