Absent The Wrong E-Book

Carys D. Coburn

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 135

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A woman looking for her child is lied to. An artist pitches a memorial that is never built. A landlord raises rents. And thousands of children disappear. Absent The Wrong is an intimate and sweeping play by Carys D. Coburn about seventy years of Irish adoptees and their search for answers. It premiered at the Abbey Theatre as part of the 2022 Dublin Theatre Festival, where it was named Best New Production.

Leseprobe

Carys D. Coburn

ABSENT THE WRONG

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production Details

Acknowledgements

Epigraphs

Characters

Note on Play

Absent The Wrong

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Why ‘Absent The Wrong ’?

Before we get to the wording of the title, a word on the spirit of the piece. At the beginning of Absent The Wrong, the character of Alice makes a video proposal for the memorial to victims of institutional abuse. There was a real competition for artists, announced in 2011; a real shortlist was selected; a real winner was selected; the monument was never built. This detail isn’t offered in the play – there were many details I had to include, and this is not one of them. I was content to leave this as a loose thread in a play that thematises loose threads, non-closure, and non-closure’s mirror image: serendipity. One adoptee never meets their birth parents because a nun lied. One birth mother realises her daughter lives five minutes down the road. A parrot goes missing in the early 2020s and is never seen again, but in the early eighties another parrot appears. The reunions are as improbable as the near-misses are cruel. There is a symmetry here but we shouldn’t mistake it for proportion – the near-misses vastly outnumber the reunions.

I was writing Absent The Wrong in 2021 – before the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published, and throughout the justifiable fallout that followed. I wanted to mark that moment. I wanted to mark the blow that it was to activists and survivors – the sense of betrayal, the confusion, the hurt.

Equally, I didn’t want to simply retread the headlines. I wanted to connect that moment of disillusionment to those who had come before, to a long and spiralling history of struggle where the same fights have to be reopened, re-won, re-lost. To honour their struggle in the moment of struggle requires reckoning with what they’ve faced till now. (Act One of the play does this.)

Equally equally, there’s a point where the duty to bear witness to the past turns back on itself. Too much documentary with not enough commentary can feel like having your nose rubbed in the worst thing that ever happened to you. Yes, that’s exactlyhow hard it’s been – what’s your point? Do you think I don’t know? You set out for affirmation and instead find despair. You have to do more than simply insist on the history; you have to insist that the history could have been otherwise – different, kinder, easier. One way of doing that as a writer is by looking for the places where things are otherwise, because if it can happen there why not everywhere? (Act Two of the play does this, sort of.) Another way is to imagine how things could be otherwise in the future, starting from the present moment. (Act Three of the play does this, sort of.)

Equally equally equally, don’t utopias always feel a little insubstantial? Doesn’t it always feel a little glib to be told that things are bound to get better? You have to be careful that sustaining hope doesn’t tip over into damaging certainty. Adoptees, adoption rights activists, institutional survivors – they’ve already had too much of empty promises.

Tricky, right? You see how, in writing the play, I was pulled back and forth by two different kinds of accountability at right- angles: to affirm the power of collective action and to refuse false closure, to assert that change for the better is possible but to deny that it is inevitable. This tension is what gives the play its shape and central question: What is, what could be instead, and how? (And when?)

That question could lead you to a very traditional structure in three acts: here’s where we were, here’s where we are, and here’s what we should do next. Absent The Wrong, looked at one way, is this kind of play. Act One is a fractured timeline that takes us through the last seventy years; Act Two is a farce for serious purposes in the present; Act Three is not straightforwardly in the future – remember my ambivalence about utopias. Instead we go backwards and forwards at once, and try to imagine all the futures that fan out from a fixed point decades ago. So you could annotate the three acts of the play as follows:

Past     Present     Future(ish)

It’s an accurate description of the play – but it would be a shit title. A first-pass improvement: in talking about how to stage the play we talked about what the primary gesture of each act was. What specific act is Act One? Two? Three? This was richer. And what we settled on was this:

Searching     Coping     Hoping

Act One searches, stutters, restarts, jumps. Act Two bears up under a great weight – it’s about how we live with the past in the present. Act Three dares to hope, refuses to despair, to accept the given as the necessary. Searching Coping Hoping is a lot stronger than Past Present Future(ish), even if it’s not actually good. It’s still falling on the side of inertly descriptive, missing the touch of poetry or mystery that draws you into the work, that drives you to try and answer the question at its heart for yourself.

We started with times, and then we added motion through them; we could get some poetry by adding some dimension, some space, some quality, some rhythm, to that motion – like this:

A Chain     A Net     A Knot

Act One is all scenes about people who’ve been unjustly denied something. Lots of them are fighting lonely battles against the same big system. Their separateness is what unites them. They’re discrete loops that come together to make a continuous line. They’re a chain. It’s strong, but it’s heavy and cold. It speaks more of need than of love.

Act Two is about a community who drive each other nuts but, at the end of the day, have each other’s backs. (More or less.) Lives interweave to make a fabric – the fabric that makes a bag that lightens your load, or a tie to hold fast what you can’t afford to lose, or an overlayer that cuts the chill of a harsh world. Community as the source of warmth, strength, depth – where need and love come together.

Act Three centres on a small small moment. Arguably it’s a moment of love. Sexual? Romantic? Platonic? You can argue for each, just like you can argue that it’s gratuitous – that this is a love that doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t get to. It isn’t allowed. Is it unimportant? Again, you could argue that. But I wouldn’t. The way I like to think of it is that this act might not lead to anything in any clear-cut way, but it shadows everything else in the play. Or maybe not shadows – illuminates. It’s a knot. A knot on its own is nothing much. A knot in the wrong place is the reason your hair won’t lie flat or one of your shoelaces is shorter than the other. But knots in the right place make your net a net, make your chain a chain. Everything good in this play depends on this purposeful tangling, this noun-verb of a place where two things blurrily start to act like one.

Finally, some poetry. Some mystery too – maybe too much. Would you think a show called A Chain A Net A Knot was about adoptees, or would you think it was about the fishing industry?

If you’ve read the epigraphs for this play already, you know where the title comes from. Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t is a history of alternative histories. Great title for a great premise. And her summary of the tort law cases in the early days of the civil rights movement is so rich: the copiousness of wrongs as a special conceptual problem posed to any tit-for-tat conception of justice. Maybe it’s self-regarding of me, as an artist, to like the emphasis she gives to the creative aspect of law; if it is difficult to imagine the conditions under which the plaintiff would exist absent the wrong, then justice demands we get good at imagining. All the same. These words, to me, unite precision with poetry. They say something about the necessity of rage and the inadequacy of regret. They accept that true restitution for a sufficiently great loss is itself a loss; the world itself would change so much – and everyone with it – that we’d lose our current selves. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? That the burden of change falls most on these who’ve already borne the most, who least deserve to bear more. Isn’t that drama, though? Cruel irony. Intent and action not lining up neatly, cleaving and cleaving. Thus, Absent The Wrong.

The last thing to say is this: I feel so lucky to have made this show with everyone. Above all, I am glad to have spent the autumn of a hard hard year in the same room with my mother and my sister as we worked on it. We’re blood, but I choose to have them at the centre of my life too. As the many many many people who love them without blood ties would agree: how could I not?

Carys D. Coburn, September 2025

Absent The Wrong was first produced by Once Off Productions, and performed on the Peacock Stage, Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival on 13 September 2022 (previews from 10 September). The cast was as follows:

Jolly Abraham Curtis-Less Ashqar Sheik Bah Noelle Brown Caoimhe Coburn Gray Kwaku Fortune Colleen Keogh Sophie Lenglinger Leah Minto Emmanuel Okoye and Peanut the cockatiel

Director

Veronica Coburn

Set Designer

Molly O’Cathain

Costume Designer

Pai Rathaya

Lighting Designer

Suzie Cummins

Composition and Sound Designer

Jenny O’Malley

Directing Associate

Claire O’Reilly

Movement

Olwyn Lyons

Dramaturg

Kirsty Housley

Hair

Leonard Daly

Producer

Cally Shine

Producer

Sara Cregan

Producer

Maura O’Keeffe

Production Manager

Rob Furey

Stage Manager

Miriam Duffy

Assistant Stage Manager

Meabh Crowe

Costume Supervisor

Siobhra O’Reardon

Directing Intern

Maureen Penrose

Set Design Assistant

Angéle Bernigole

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Trish, Andrew, Lorraine and Grace and the IamIrish team, to Claire McGettrick born Lorraine Hughes. Thank you to Conrad from AMRI, to Caelainn Hogan, to Conall O’Fatharta.

C.D.C.

‘Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?’

James Joyce, Ulysses

‘As the Bakke case also illustrated, though, the difficulty of specifying wrongdoers was compounded by the difficulty of exactly delimiting the wrongs… In the case of African Americans, the copiousness of wrongs was a special conceptual problem that not only turned “history” into the culprit but also made it difficult to imagine the historical conditions under which the plaintiff would exist absent the wrong… The problem, therefore, was not that one couldn’t point to past wrongs, but that in the relations between black and white in America, one could point to very little else.’

Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction,

Characters

ALICE, one part across Acts One, Two, Three. First played by Leah Minto, first written with/for Ayoola Smart. Alice has been raised believing she’s Nigerian Irish but isn’t. The actor playing her may identify as Black or not, but should have some African heritage.

NANCY, one part across Acts One, Two, Three. First written with/for Noelle Brown and first played by Noelle Brown. Nancy is a white Irish woman, of an age to be Alice’s mother.

MICHAEL / KING / MAN, same character in Acts One and Three, different in Act Two. First played by Sheik Bah, first written with/for Ryan Cobina Lincoln. Michael/Man is Black. He doesn’t know his parentage, but assumes his mother was Irish and white. King is an Irish citizen from a Ghanaian family.

T / THOMAS, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First played by Curtis-Lee Ashqar, first written with/for Trevor Kaneswaran. Thomas is a Palestinian Irish man from the North, and he’s a father.

C / CIARA, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First played by Caoimhe Coburn Gray, first written with/for Caoimhe Coburn Gray. Ciara is a white or white-passing Irish woman with fluent ISL.

F / FUNMI, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First played by Jolly Abraham, written with/for Felicia Olusanya. Funmi is the older sister (or half- sister, they don’t fuss those things) of Edward. Funmi grew up in Nigeria, but Edward might not have.

A / ANNA, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First played by Sophie Lamiokor Lenglinger, first written with/for Ashling Edward O’Shea. Anna has an English accent, but grew up in Kampala – she can be played by a Desi performer or a Black performer. Either way, there is something about how she relates to her life/heritage that makes Alice want to throw things.

J / JILL, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First played by Colleen Keogh, first written with/for Jade Jordan. Jill is a Black woman, not necessarily but probably Irish. (In our production she was Scottish, and that was perfect.)

E / EDWARD, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First written with/for Emmanuel Okoye and first played by Emmanuel Okoye. See Funmi above for background details on Edward. Additionally, it is vital that Edward really enjoys being gay.

K / RICHIE, different parts in Acts One and Two, lines as assigned in Three. First written with/for Kwaku Fortune and first played by Kwaku Fortune. Richie is a Ghanaian Irish man who grew up in Ireland but isn’t a citizen.

Additionally, Absent The Wrong features a live cockatiel. The character of Phil (as-in-Lynott) the cockatiel was first played by Peanut the cockatiel.

Note on Text

/ indicates a point of overlap. A line / enclosed / means the lines either side of it run continuous.

[ ] indicates an option for an unspoken end of an unfinished sentence.

Note on Play

Absent The Wrong can be performed by ten performers, because it was developed with ten performer-collaborators. It can be performed with a lot more people, but not fewer. The doublings/ breakdown given here are as they were for the 2022 Dublin Fringe Festival premiere. If anyone is confused as to why the Act One initialled roles and the Act Two named roles have the same initial in all but one case – that’s because Kwaku wanted to do more of the Ghana material in Act One, so I moved some of the doublings around from the initial schema to make that easier. Testimonial from contributors is given in italics after the heading/title, with line breaking to indicate approximate rhythms/timings. Brackets are used to show the inferred/ intended completion of speech sounds that don't become full words. In our production, these were lip-synced.

ACT ONE – VOICES