The Asylum Workshop

A new documentary playa bout the history of Ireland’s first public psychiatric hospital that weaves together verbatim letters and testaments from patients and families, reports from doctors and nurses, and expert analysis from historians and psychiatrists.

You think this is dignified? A bunch of students playing with someone’s medical records? Why did 20th century Ireland lock up so many people? After all the scandals about Ireland’s institutions - the industrial schools, the mother and baby homes, the Magdalene laundries - why have we still barely investigated the largest institutions of them all: the psychiatric hospitals? Today, Grangegorman is home to the newly opened campus of Technological University Dublin. But for nearly 200 years, it housed a forbidding institution behind high walls. The Asylum Workshop is a new documentary play by Colin Murphy about the history of Ireland’s first public psychiatric hospital. Drawing on unique access to the hospital’s archives, it weaves together verbatim testimony from patients and families, reports from doctors and nurses, and analysis from historians and psychiatrists. This edition is published to coincide with the production by Technological University Dublin and Grangegorman Histories in the East Quad Black Box Theatre in June 2023.