The Penal Laws’ examines cultural conquest, specifically the state repression of belief, language, custom and laws of an indigineous people. The ensemble, consisting of Crooked House’s Senior Ensemble, explores the historical oppression using the metaphor of a classroom, drawing upon young people’s experiences of being in the second-level school system in Ireland. The work also uses an ancillary image of performer-audience

relationship to comment on the colonial relationship. Featuring a contstant backdrop of both complimentary and contradictory imaging and words, the classroom scenario inevitably suffers from a complete and absolut breakdown of both normality and realism, as the teacher, who in a sense is the coloniser, becomes increasingly overpowered by the colonised. The Penal Laws was alos unique, in that like all installments of The Act of Oblivion series, included a unique twist or element. In The Penal Laws, on two seperate occassions audiences were able to vote off characters based on their collective response to each individual character and their actions. The play would dynamically evolve and change based on the nearly innumerable permutations of character removals. The Penal Laws was also partially devised with the intention of later brining it to the For/With/By Festival in Birmingham, England.

Promotional trailer produced in the run up to the production:

A full, edited performance of the production: