No Escape

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse or the Ryan Report was published in May 2009. Almost a year later the Abbey Theatre presented The Darkest Corner Series featuring No Escape, compiled and edited by Mary Raftery, a reading of Richard Johnson’s The Evidence I Shall Give which premiered in 1961 at the Abbey Theatre and James X by Gerard Mannix Flynn. 

The Abbey Theatre considered commissioning a play, reading the entire report aloud from beginning to end or doing a series of Talks. It resolved to invite Mary Raftery, the journalist whose rigorous and committed investigation of child abuse led to the establishment of the Commission, to create the script. This was the first time the Abbey Theatre commissioned a piece of documentary theatre.