Emma Donoghue: ‘With birth, it’s a real spin of the roulette wheel. Women’s lives have always been determined by this crapshoot’

Four years ago this month, when Emma Donoghue finished writing The Pull of the Stars, the novel that she has just turned into a play, its plot quickly came to seem eerily prescient.

Set over three feverish days in the maternity ward of an inner-city Dublin hospital towards the end of the first World War, it follows a trio of women – a midwife, a doctor and a hospital volunteer – who are looking after a group of vulnerable expectant mothers quarantined by an illness that would kill millions of people around the world.

The war and the pandemic rage outside – “Stay out of public places”, as a government notice on a lamp-post warns. “See only those persons one needs to see. Refrain from shaking hands, laughing, or chatting closely together” – the pregnant women and their carers are fighting their own battles within the hospital’s walls.

Among the problems that the midwife, Julia Power, has to deal with as the nurse in charge of her understaffed ward is that the patients are delirious, supplies are rationed and the disease can, among its other effects, induce premature labour.

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Donoghue was inspired to write the story in 2018, after reading about the spread, a century earlier, of what was then known as Spanish flu. Expectant mothers, their pregnancies physical acts of womanhood that women of all classes were expected to go through again and again, were its most vulnerable patients.

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“Healthcare is deemed to be this great equaliser, but it’s not,” says the author, who is back in Dublin from her home in Canada to help bring her script to the stage of the Gate Theatre. “And with birth – though it’s not like any other health issue, because, of course, it’s not an illness – it’s a real spin of the roulette wheel.

“I, like an awful lot of women, had a thing that went wrong during one of my pregnancies which could have killed me if I hadn’t been in a good hospital. It makes you realise that women’s lives have always been determined by this crapshoot – specifically, the ones in lower classes who were expected to perform this ritual time and again.”

The play is a wholly female narrative, framing childbirth as “women’s war”, a struggle that, “because it’s so common, and because we all came from birth ourselves, it’s just seen as routine”, Donoghue told The Irish Times when the novel on which it is based was published. “The most feminist decision I made was to choose to set the book in a maternity ward. All sorts of dramas were going on, but here’s the drama that is going on all the time.”

A lot of my books have been about women, and how their lives are stuck, be that at home or incarcerated

That original book – whose title derives from “influenza delle stelle”, the Italian term for the medieval belief that our illnesses were governed by the heavens – has one important male character, Julia’s brother, and some minor ones. But they don’t appear in the stage version, as Róisín McBrinn, the Gate’s artistic director, suggested that Donoghue turn it into an all-woman story.

“With any theatre adaptation there’s a pruning process, so I probably would have ended up with a mostly female cast anyway. But I loved the idea of putting women so front and centre, since Irish theatre has long had a problem with being dominated by male voices,” Donoghue says, adding, “It’s funny what contemporary relevance this story of 1918 has, especially as women’s bodily autonomy is being ripped away in countries such as the US. Staging this play in Ireland, with its long, fraught history of women having no choices at all, feels particularly important.”

How to re-create the feel of a maternity ward – perhaps not least because the Gate Theatre’s neighbour is the Rotunda maternity hospital, which endured its own battles during the Covid-19 pandemic – has been a priority. “I wanted to capture the atmosphere of birth,” Donoghue says. “So it never could have been a sedate, well-made play. It had to be a whirlwind, with little space for breathing.”

When you’re watching the play “you can’t but be aware that you are looking at women’s bodies at their most vulnerable”, says Louise Lowe, its director, who adds that working midwives joined them during rehearsals. (Donoghue also consulted a midwife when she was writing the book, to help ensure the accuracy of her descriptions.) It “fuelled our desire to be more articulate”, Lowe says, adding that their input helped the play become “very busy and visceral – in the best way”.

Donoghue has repeatedly been drawn towards writing historical fiction, not so much to inhabit or reinterpret the past as to try to provide a better understanding of our past by considering missing pieces.

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“I’m really drawn to those who were left out of the historical record,” she says. “Mostly because it makes for a better story. And then if you can feel that you’re sort of speaking for the long-forgotten as well, it does give you extra fire in the belly. A lot of my books have been about women and how their lives are stuck, be that at home or incarcerated. I’m thinking of girls who can’t go to school with the Taliban. Worldwide, there have been so many ways in which women have been stuck – this is just another one.”

The play’s title intentionally evokes The Plough and the Stars, as Seán O’Casey’s plays were what first drew Donoghue’s attention “to the fact that those beautiful Georgian buildings around Dublin had been the most horrifying slums, and the contrast between the gracious lines of the buildings and the families coughing up their lungs inside”. Like the ailing Mollser Gogan in The Plough and the Stars, both of Donoghue’s parents had tuberculosis as teenagers.

Kathleen Lynn, the doctor in The Pull of the Stars (who is played in the Gate production by Maeve Fitzgerald), is based on the suffragist and 1916 rebel who, with her partner, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, founded St Ultan’s Hospital for Sick Infants, in Dublin, in 1919. Lynn’s presence in the story makes plain the links between the health of pregnant women and the choices made by the society they are part of – in this case, as Donoghue has put it, not just “Ireland’s culture of pushing women to have so many babies, but also the sheer lack of clean water or lack or air or food”.

Bridie Sweeney, the young volunteer among the story’s trio of carers, has grown up in an institution, experiencing abuse and mistreatment. “I wanted to take a character like that and give her three days when she would feel needed and useful and have a sense of vocation,” Donoghue told The Irish Times in 2020.

She created Bridie (played by Ghaliah Conroy, with Sarah Morris as Julia Power) after reading the Ryan report. The State’s 10-year inquiry into child abuse in residential institutions “proved beyond doubt”, as Katherine Zappone put it as minister for children, “that children were treated like inmates in a prison, and like slaves”. Donoghue says that every novel she writes involves one gruelling piece of research; the Ryan report was that for The Pull of the Stars.

She has now written more than 20 books – including Room, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film – with three more in progress. She often works on several projects at once – sometimes as many as five, she says. “When I find myself getting fed up with one project I switch to another in a way that feels adulterous,” she says with a laugh.

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Born in Dublin in 1969, the youngest of eight, Donoghue was “always in a hurry” as a child, often running home from school to complete poetry between sheets of homework. “There were 10 of us at the table. Trying to find a gap to throw in my two cents when you’re the youngest, and by definition a little twerp, is not easy.” Her father, the late academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue, instilled a sense of curiosity and work ethic from day dot. “I never allow myself to feel prolific, as my dad wrote books well into his 90s.”

At the first table read it felt like we’d written something not dissimilar to Fawlty Towers, because these actors were so witty, getting a laugh out of everything

What has the work involved in the rehearsal process been like? “The whole thing comes in waves,” Donoghue says with a smile. “Moments of crisis and then tea and chats, and actually a lot of laughter. At the first table read it felt like we’d written something not dissimilar to Fawlty Towers, because these actors were so witty, getting a laugh out of everything. But, you know, there’s a lovely unexpected nature to it all, going between crisis and merriment, solidarity and hostility. It’s very, very alive, and in no way a static situation.”

Laughter is the best way to send the play’s message, she says. “Certain people open their minds when they’re laughing, in a way they don’t otherwise. It’s getting a point across without lecturing, which is really powerful. It’s also really crucial, as to not feel like nonstop suffering.”

The Pull of the Stars opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, April 10th, with previews from Friday, April 5th