Ronan Carr's new play Down By The River Saile tells the true story of an impoverished Derry woman, Florrie Kavanagh, living in London in the 1950s, who gives her baby to the Hollywood star Jane Russell; an event which caused moral outrage and considerable public scandal at the time.
Below, Ronan Carr previews Down By the River Sáile...
About 40 years after her death, I got to talking with Hannah Florence ’Florrie’ Kavanagh.
I met her in a book about the slums of Derry.
She introduced herself as a footnote to another famous life. "You see," Florrie told me while sucking on a woodbine, "in 1952 I gave my son away to movie star Jane Russell. It caused a big fuss. You should write about me"
It wasn’t something I was interested in. The world is now awash with stories about Irish babies adopted against their will. I said "Lovely to have met you", closed the book and moved on.
Then a month after that initial meeting, I was researching the life of Theatre Designer Sean Kenny (for my RTÉ radio play To Sean With Love) in the yellowing newspaper pages of the internet when I bumped into Florrie once more.
This time she told me "Course, you know, I was murdered".
I didn’t know, but there in the January 1980 edition of the Daily Mirror was confirmation - Florrie was strangled to death in her flat in London.
"You should have told me that in the first place" I said to her.
"You never asked" she replied.
I love a good murder mystery, so next thing I knew she had moved in to help me write the play. She talked while I typed. She smoked while I choked.
There was a lot about this remarkable Derry woman that was different from the other stories. She was no Philomena. This was Florrie’s third child. She was still married and yet she was determined to give the baby away. She was a wrong ‘un, a pariah, delusional and an awful mother .
" I know that’s what they say about me" she said stubbing out another dog-end onto my kitchen table, " But now I want to tell my side of it".
Florrie’s voice was faint at first - there were only fragments of facts about her; mostly ruminations and insinuations, but with an artistic licence (mine: 8 penalty points) and her anarchic bent she grew strong.
She told me about the excitement of seeing the American sailors sail up the river Foyle in World War Two; of being transfixed by Joe Stafford singing in the US army camp in Derry and then her move to London to hit the big time. She was going to be a star.
Then, of course, she fell in love. She met her husband Michael, a carpenter from Galway, and moved into a flat in Southwark to raise their wains.
So how does she end up giving away a child to Jane Russell that eventually led to her brutal strangulation?
What she told me was...
"WHIST!"
"Are you clean off yer head?" her voice said, enveloped in smoke, "Say nothing!, Don’t you want people to come see the play and find out for themselves?"
Of course, I thought, this gal knows the showbiz.
So instead of disappearing back to the footnotes, Florrie Kavanagh will be on the stage, centre-stage this time (in the corporal form of actress Anne Gallagher) in my play Down by The River Saile at Dublin's Pearse Centre.
Come and see what all the big fuss was about.
Down by The River Saile runs from June 28th to July 1st at The Pearse Centre, Pearse Street, Dublin - find out more here.
