An Australian government report in 2012 estimated as many as 150,000 babies in Australia were adopted between 1951 and 1975. Many of them were adopted without the consent of their birth mother under a pattern of forced adoptions in which women were detained against their will, some even drugged to prevent escape.
We may never know the full horror of this system of forced adoption given the baby was taken from the mother at birth and the records of where they were taken sealed so both parent and child would never know their birth connection.
Madison Cole’s play Inferna gives us a glimpse of this brutal system through the imagined story of the 15-year-old schoolgirl Calynn (Arabella Morton), who in 1962 Sydney seems to know very little about sex.
The play opens with her innocently asking her friend Alessia (Paloma Hill) about what happens in such encounters. Yet she is confident enough later to sneak off from her mother’s home to a party where she suddenly surprises James (Ciaran Barker) with a kiss. Although they have a mutual interest in each other, James lays out a blanket and tells her to trust him. As the stage darkens, we hear her telling him to stop.
When the mother realises Calynn has become pregnant, she drives her thousands of miles across Australia to a religious asylum for pregnant women. Drugged by the authoritarian nun, Eris (Maire McGovern), she finds it difficult to move around, never mind escape. However, she becomes friends with her pregnant, more worldly roommate Daya (Gracie Oddie-James) who is reading the book Inferna. It is Daya who points out that since Calynn didn’t consent to sex with James, it was rape.
She also finds she can talk with the kindly asylum worker Ana (Alice Pryor), who has spent all her life in the institution. Every so often in the hospital, we hear the screams of women as they give birth, and in one scene, we see Ana carrying off a newborn child.
Meanwhile, back in Sydney, James and Alessia, knowing nothing about the pregnancy and worrying about the missing Calynn, confront the mother about their friend’s whereabouts. Alone and traumatised, Carlynn will return many months later via a four-day bus journey to her younger sister Cate (Phoebe Hooper), her disturbed mother and the friends who are still wondering about her.
This is an ambitious play that tries to show the layers of suffering of various characters as a consequence of the systemic cruelty and abuse of a society that too easily denies children the right to have a say in what happens to them.
But in some ways that ambition hinders the drama. Some characters, particularly the one-dimensional mother and the unsympathetic asylum worker Eris, are barely sketched, and some scenes seem a little rushed and functional. There is no time for the dialogue to build much tension, empathy or humour. There is little time for the revelation of a plot point before it rushes on to something else.
All this can, despite the compassion of the writing as it takes us to our hidden history, make the issue of forced adoption and the characters we encounter seem a little remote.