"I have a memory which recurs - it leads me always down the same dark avenue to Anna Magee." So the haunting voice of the unnamed old man tells us in Poorhouse, the impressionistic, screen version of a short story set during the Famine by Michael Harding, to be seen on RTE 1 at 10.25 p.m. next Wednesday.
Poorhouse was adapted for the screen by Michael Harding with Frank Stapleton, who also directs. "It is primarily an exploration of memory and how the past permeates the present," says Stapleton.
Anna Magee (played by Derbhle Crotty in a performance that is remarkable for its combination of agony and restraint) is an attractive young peasant woman who is sacked from her job in the local big house because she shows signs of fever. She ends up working in the union workhouse, as a laundress, with other victims of the Famine (who are variously employed, operating the water pump for the laundry, or breaking stones).
The old man who tells us Anna's story (in a riveting performance by Birdy Sweeney), pushes a cart which he uses either to bury the dead or carry the laundry. His role involves certain privileges, such as sleeping in the bakery and helping himself to the bread.
While keeping his distance so as to remain undetected, he observes Anna closely. He finds himself falling in love with her: we see him leaving hunks of bread for her or burying his face in the delicate clothes she has laundered. Without showing his feelings to Anna, he tells us that she is the mother, wife and daughter he never had. He confesses: "Each of us had a pretty doll, a favourite one who we hoped would never die. The others we flailed with our hungry teeth."
The grinding despair of life in the poorhouse, where each starving and demoralised inmate is reduced to ruthless selfishness, is captured in evocative, largely silent scenes where facial expressions do the work of a thousand words. The isolation of each character is rendered all the more tellingly in this lack of communication. This effect is heightened by the intimacy of the only voice we do hear, that of the old man, who is speaking out his heart, too late, to an audience he cannot see.
The bleak, colourless landscape of the workhouse is shot, appropriately enough, in sepia (although even this device cannot disguise the cheerful sunlight - drizzling rain might have been more suitable weather for such a story of suffering). All movement is slowed down to a stylised paced that highlights the hopeless lethargy of life in the workhouse, where the old man is kept busy with his cart disposing of the bodies of the dead. There is a particularly vivid scene, shot from the perspective of a makeshift grave, where the innocent faced corpse of a young man tipped into the pit.
The 30 minute drama was filmed on location in a cutstone workhouse which survives largely intact at Bawnboy in Co Cavan. "We stripped one of the yards of ivy and did most of the filming there," says director Frank Stapleton. The film is minimalistic and suggestive rather than a full blown period drama with all the trimmings. This bare, authentic setting is highly effective, particularly during a dream sequence, where Anna pulls back the coverlet of a bed to reveal a pile of stones.
STAPLETON was also the director of an atmospheric documentary about the life and work of the Irish language poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill: An tAnam Mothala/The Peeling Soul. Screened on RTE last year, it was marked by a similar fascination with dream and memory, and also interspersed colour with sepia footage.
In several other works, such as his play Una Pooka, Harding has focussed on the suffering of women like the unfortunate Anna Magee, who are left, in the words of Stapleton, "to carry the horror of the time". Harding was inspired to write the original short story which inspired Poorhouse by reading the journal of a Master of a workhouse during the time of the Famine: "His story is not a literal take on the journal, but more of an imaginative take on what is described there," Stapleton says.
The screen version of the story operates on a similar level, with a surreal thread to it that ends up looping back and forth between time zones to explore the notion of ancestral memory. Poorhouse will cave the viewer with some powerful and unsettling images that are particularly fitting for the sacrificial vein of Faster week.