“Which is least like the other?” A projection flicks to drawings of three dogs and a cat. It’s an old-fashioned IQ test, and the frenzy of Brian Irvine’s music gives us an inkling of the confusion of Rosemary Kennedy, grasping at the questions as they flash by.
Rosemary, sister of John, Robert and Ted, is the subject of this powerful 75-minute work from Irvine and the director and designer Netia Jones, first staged in Galway in 2019 and brought to London in another welcome visit from Irish National Opera. The odd one out in the starry Kennedy family, she was all but airbrushed from its history. A botched birth left her with learning difficulties; in 1941, aged 23, she was lobotomised at her father’s behest. The operation left her incapacitated and institutionalised for the rest of her long life, a victim of the calamitous othering of people like her, women especially, and the hubris of those who claimed to be able to “cure” them.
