Bridget Cleary was murdered. We hear about that fact in the first minutes of Lauren Carter’s sensitive, politically sharp play The Burning, which takes us back to the circumstances leading up to that death in 1895.
We don’t see the killing or the way the body was treated. Instead, the play reminds us of a context in which women had to fit into safe, domesticated patterns and those who deviated from that were punished for the deviation.
The atmospheric opening has the large cast standing centre-stage in a triangular shape, swaying from side to side. The scene changes to a conversation among villagers about the death of Bridget. One of them says they were there when it happened. Another says Bridget was a difficult woman.
Our story shifts back to what this difficulty might be, as we meet Bridget (Romilly Middlemiss) and her friend Caragh Moore (Phoebe Williams).
James (Sam Whitby) is privately proposing marriage to Caragh. She looks delighted, till he adds that he wants six children, a clean house and to move his parents in with them. The look on her face tells us what she thinks of that. But Bridget’s husband Michael (Michael Onobhayedo) for the last eight years has similar assumptions and is unhappy that they haven’t had children. We meet him telling Bridget off for supposedly “humiliating” him in the pub. The humiliation was her independent, assertive behaviour that must be stopped.
We glimpse similar irritations among other women talking amongst themselves. Things become more complicated when Caragh and Bridget begin to regard each other as more than just friends.
This highly watchable, well-performed play, lets us glimpse a terrible situation from the hidden history of women’s mistreatment by society.