Stories of life and death in the theatre

How and why did the Irish Council for Bioethics find itself backing a play exploring the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia, cloned children and in vitro fertilization?

HOW FAR should we push technology in the quest to have a child? Is it acceptable for people with long-term illness to decide when to end their lives? And what kind of emotional baggage comes with the tag of “saviour sibling”?

Those are some of the thorny questions tackled by a new play that puts a human face on bioethics. Begotten Not Made, written by Paul Meade, had a public reading last week to an appreciative audience at Farmleigh in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

The work explores the dilemmas facing three couples, interweaving the stories of a person with multiple sclerosis who travels with her husband to Switzerland for assisted suicide, a brother who was born to provide cells to save his sister and prospective parents who must cope with the use of a donor egg for in vitro fertilization.

The work came about through a competition run by the Irish Council for Bioethics, which invited playwrights to bring bioethical issues to a wide audience.

“Any society should decide how it wants to evolve, the kind of scientific knowledge it wants to harness and the kind of medicine it wants to use,” says Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan, managing scientific director of the ICB. “But because so many of these topics can be very emotive it can be difficult to find a forum where people can discuss them in a non-confrontational way.”

Lectures offer a certain platform, but a play could encourage a wider audience to think about actual situations, she explains.

So the council put out the call. “There were two criteria: it had to be scientifically and medically accurate, and it had to be balanced, both sides of every argument had to be put in the play,” explains O’Sullivan.

THE COMPETITION DREW 120 entries, but eventually the steering committee of scientific and theatre experts decided on the proposed work by Meade, who is co-artistic director of Gúna Nua Theatre Company in Dublin.

“The thing that appealed about Paul’s play was that it was about questions of life and death, the choices that people make and how they impact on people’s lives and identity,” says O’Sullivan.

With a commission of €11,000 from the ICB, Meade set about developing the play and found the bioethical issues provided plenty of meat.

“The dilemmas are so huge, it was unlike any other play I had ever written, it was almost like the characters were writing themselves,” he says. “I chose the three stories because they were about life and death and I was trying to find ways the stories chimed off each other, how the themes resonated with each other during the play.”

Behind the scenes, Meade was sure to do his research, talking to scientists and reading up on the ethical and legal issues. The saviour sibling sub-plot was a particularly tricky one to navigate, he explains.

“At first I was going to set that in the future. In Ireland it’s only a dream to have a saviour sibling, but it has happened in other parts of the world. And originally I wanted them as children but through different drafts they became adults.”

The play, directed by Jim Culleton of Fishamble, the New Theatre Company, had its first road-test in last week’s reading to an invited audience from the spheres of science, philosophy and the arts, and prompted discussion of the issues afterwards.

“People were saying really we have to marry the political with the cultural and human, so people can think about this,” says Meade.

“There’s a dearth of regulation here in Ireland and I think it’s because people are sweeping the issues under the carpet, they are not dealing with them and I think if the play could stimulate even a small amount of debate in Ireland I’d be delighted with that. I think to expand people’s perspectives on it would be great.”

The ICB will now seek funding to help produce the play, first in Ireland and then possibly in other European countries, says O’Sullivan.

“It has been a complete departure for us and really interesting, we have learned so much,” she says. “And the play does exactly what it was supposed to do, it puts a human face on [issues]. You could see people were moved by the various stories.”