Shane Hegarty reviews the familiar but still powerful Sinners and The Century of the Self which looked at the history of the influence of the Freud family.
There was one preview in the British papers during the week which described Sinners as a "familiar tale". The idea of the Irish experience - the rain, the misery, the religion, the sex and abuse, the uselessness of the men and the fortitude of the women has become familiar, to the point where shock is being nudged aside by satire.
The tipping point came with Frank McCourt and his statement that: "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." It pre- emptively satirised the misery that would follow, and allowed everyone else to do it. It also cemented the Irish as having a monopoly on misery. All that nonsensical, rambling woe you've heard shouted by that drunken Paddy at the bar? He was right all along.
Superficially, then, Sinners was a familiar story. The clerical abuse. The prayers. The relentless splashing of the rain. The monotonous dank grey which made Alan Parker's treatment of Angela's Ashes ultimately unbearable to watch. But at its core was a story that, however familiar it becomes, has an awfulness that can never be diminished.
The magdalen laundries were created so we could ignore them, and they now look so far removed from modern experience as to be hardly believable.
Sinners was, for the most part, a drama of substance and restraint, its subject deftly handled so that familiarity did not breed contempt.
In many respects, it was quite straightforward. To a 1960s soundtrack of Petula Clark, a car approached a house and soon left it with a pregnant single girl, Anne Marie (Anne Marie Duff). She found herself trapped in a place that was a hell ostensibly on the road to heaven. There was the wise head, Kitty (Bronagh Gallagher), the vicious Sister Bernadette (Tina Kellegher) and a prison whose walls were both those of the actual building and of the society without.
The central performance in Sinners was not Anne Marie Duff's, but that of Bronagh Gallagher, playing the stock character of an inmate with wisdom and strength who is ultimately crushed by the sheer brutality of her surroundings. Her performance seemed natural and free-flowing, very much in the way that Brenda Fricker has mastered. It dominated, and her absence following her character's suicide was the moment when the piece began to lose momentum.
Tina Kellegher's Sister Bernadette was cold, savage and driven by the requisite warped morals, yet inhabited a character as constrained and blank as the habit she wore.
Sinners worked best in its quieter moments. Scriptwriter Lizzie Mickery has spent most of her career writing for such soapy mush as Sunburn, Harbour Lights and, most notably, Heartbeat - that soap with its tepid, simplified, nostalgia-driven depiction of the 1960s.
It was as an anti-Heartbeat that Sinners worked best. The most poignant scenes came in the social room, a dark, enlarged cell where the women danced illicitly to pop music on the radio. It was the notion of the liberal 1960s contrasted by the reality, and a neat Beckettian metaphor for their plight. A place where the women's sporadic fantasies of freedom sucked them only further into hopelessness.
Except, though, for Anne Marie. The tautness and boldness of the script gradually gave away to "triumph of the human spirit" glibness. A tale which initially set out to explore the awesome tragedy of the magdalen laundries slowly succumbed to the temptation of an improbably happy ending, in which she could leave on the arm of a man, and those she left behind could wave happily after her.
Anne-Marie had her son taken from her, but in attempting to escape with him she found herself hiding in the home of kindly Frank (John Kavanagh). He handed her back to the nuns, yet Anne Marie's fate was not the further punishment of being sent to a mental institution proper, but to be rescued by Frank after he took pity. He asked her to marry him. Proud and pragmatic, she said yes, with the proviso that there would be no sex. Freedom came with the signing of a document. It might, the writer could claim, be one woman's tale, and a fictional one at that, but it would hardly represent the general experience.
The last magdalen laundry closed in 1996. Six years ago. The year, in fact, in which Frank McCourt cemented Irish misery as the most miserable, most marketable of all. After that, the Tiger roared, the rain stopped and single women pushed prams without a care.
Setting Sinners in the 1960s - that faraway land - and giving it a happy ending, allowed this viewer to feel a little better about himself as the credits rolled. It is unlikely that Sinners was shown in the mental institutions around Ireland, where many of the women remain.
The basic premise of The Century of the Self sounds dry, overly academic and requiring of effort, but this is an engrossing, accessible, enlightening series. It is essentially a history of the influence of the Freud family. Last week it looked at how Sigmund's nephew, Edward Burnays, created public relations by applying his uncle's theories of the unconscious. This week concentrated on Sigmund's daughter, Anna, and her Frankenstein-like attempt to create the perfect citizen.
Freud's psychoanalysis formed the bedrock of a mass experiment, an attempt to lobotomise the populace, to create acquiescent citizens and consumers.
People, went the thinking, are essentially irrational, confused beings who need guidance if they are to fit snugly into the elite's notion of the social norm. There was a battle between the id and the ego of the masses. The mental breakdowns of second World War veterans, it was thought, came not from their experiences in battle but from how these triggered suppressed subconscious emotions. Control those triggers, and you could control the people.
It began with Anna Freud's experiments on the Burlingham family, five children and their mother, out of whom Freud intended to create Stars-and-Stripes-and-apple-pie people, as well as a template for wider application. Her work seemed a huge success. Little Bob Burlingham did not become a homosexual and his sisters did mighty fine too.
Hundreds of psychoanalysts were trained, the principles applied to the people. And as they were people, they must be consumers too. Enter Ernest Dichter, a neighbour of Sigmund's back in old Vienna and the man who revolutionised marketing by inventing the focus group. He didn't ask questions, he just let the lab rats talk. He gave them the failing brand of Betty Crocker Cakemix and asked them to free-associate. He discovered that housewives were feeling guilt about by the ease of life delivered by convenience foods.
What did he do? He told Betty Crocker to add an egg to the recipe. Allow the housewife to crack an egg into the cake mix and, to her, it would be symbolic of presenting her own eggs to her husband. Sales of Betty Crocker Cakemix went through the roof.
The Century of the Self is a library filled with "The World's Most Fascinating Facts", and you just don't know which book to open first. In the 1950s, Edward Burnays orchestrated a CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, after creating the perception of a Communist menace on the US doorstep where none actually existed. When the government asked him how it should "sell" the Cold War and all its apocalyptic dread to the American people, he said to forget about reassurance or logical argument, and instead stoke up the people's fear. Elsewhere, the CIA - not subtle in its paranoia - opened a hospital in which patients had their entire lives wiped, the blank slate to be replaced with positives only.
All it did was produce dozens of people with no memories, but who repeated the slogan: "I am at ease with myself." Among the wider public, the attempt to produce consumers at ease with themselves proved unrealistic, instead creating people confused and frustrated as they were forced to choose between aisles of products that were essentially the same. The scientists had wanted to create a people moulded to norms, without stopping to consider whether those norms were normal at all. As Martin Luther King put it so forcefully, if this is the society they want us to adjust to, "I am proud to be maladjusted".
Meanwhile, back at the lab, the Burlingham family proved not so model after all. As they matured, so did their neuroses. There was a series of mental breakdowns among the children. Bob became a severe alcoholic. And one girl, Maddy, returned for regular treatment over the years, until one day she visited Anna Freud's house and committed suicide.
Now, I'm no psychoanalyst, but . . .