Mary O’Malley said she wrote Once A Catholic in order to write Catholicism right out of her system only to find she then had a void to be filled and that there was no magic in atheism. Her play is set in a convent school in Willesden in the 1950’s. No commercial management was interested in it until the Royal Court staged it in 1977. It transferred to the West End and ran for two years and wiped out the Royal Court’s deficit. Ironically, it was not even a typical Royal Court play. It was its mixture of religious dogma, sex and bad language, which made it commercially viable.
Revived now by Kathy Burke and acted in a very broad manner, as if the scenes were a series of sketches in a revue, it comes across as very coarse and ridiculously one-sided. There’s not a good nun on stage. They are all insensitive, hypocritical and vicious caricatures. Cecilia Noble’s Afro-Caribbean nun is a stand-up comedy routine. Clare Cathcart’s grimacing sadistic nun is as subtle as a gargoyle. Sean Campion’s table-thumping priest, who takes a prurient interest in confession, declares missing mass is a far greater sin than murder. The music teacher, a lapsed Catholic, who hates and despises nuns, is exceptionally creepy.
O’Malley claimed the play was not autobiographical; though the blatantly unfair treatment of the leading character, Mary McGinty (so well played by Amy Morgan) feels very like autobiography. McGinty is a good Catholic, poor, hardworking, always anxious to please, but in her sexual innocence and ignorance, she regularly embarrasses the nuns with the directness of her questions and is labelled a troublemaker. The most shocking and unbelievable scene is when the Mother Superior (Kate Lock) denies McGinty (whose “O’ level results are the best in the school), her rightful place in the Sixth Form out of spite and rejects her sincere desire to be a nun out of hand.