Least Like The Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy

[lennygoran]

A friend from Great Britain sent me a review on this work. I'm not sure I'd give this a try if it ever came to NYC? Regards, Len

The ROH describes it this way:
Least Like The Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy
17–19 January 2023
A thought-provoking work about Rosemary Kennedy, the older sister of President John F. Kennedy, presented by Irish National Opera.

For years, the story of Rosemary Kennedy, the older sister of President John F. Kennedy, was shrouded in secrecy. This explosive and thought-provoking piece of music theatre uses recently-released archive material to explore the events leading up to Rosemary’s disastrous lobotomy at the age of 23.

Director, designer and video artist Netia Jones (Current, Rising, ATTHIS, Kafka Fragments) directs a searing portrait of 1940s America. The piece is an indictment of societal taboos surrounding the challenges of mental health, and the doctors whose egos and ‘pioneering’ treatments caused irrevocable damage. Fergus Sheil (Artistic Director of Irish National Opera) conducts Brian Irvine’s kaleidoscopic score.



And here's a review from the London Times:

Powerful, wealthy, glamorous: the Kennedys had it all. No other family can boast a US president, an attorney-general and a senator all from the same generation. Yet the glittering successes of the high-achieving Irish-American clan were blighted by tragedy: deaths by assassination, plane crash and drug overdose, near-misses with car accidents and drownings. Perhaps none of the family’s stories is more devastating than that of Rosemary Kennedy, the oldest of John F Kennedy’s sisters, who in 1941 was lobotomised aged 23. It went disastrously wrong.

For decades she was hidden away from the press, wider society and even her own siblings. Left by the operation unable to speak or walk properly, her intellectual capacity reduced to that of a toddler, she lived out her days in an institution in rural Wisconsin, dying in 2005. In recent years the tale of the “missing Kennedy” has been pieced together in multiple biographies, inspiring Hollywood interest — and now an opera. Arriving at the Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House for its UK premiere, presented by Irish National Opera, Least Like the Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy investigates the events leading up to the lobotomy that destroyed her life as she knew it.

“Rosemary was born with what would be termed mild learning difficulties,” Brian Irvine, the Belfast-born composer of Least Like the Other, tells me over Zoom from Scotland. “They were largely brought on by her birth being physically restricted.” She was the third child and first daughter of Joseph [Joe] and Rose, born in September 1918 — which is where this opera begins. Spanish flu was sweeping through Boston, and the doctor was delayed arriving at the home birth. Nurses weren’t allowed to deliver babies without a physician — nor would he be paid his fee if he wasn’t present — so Rose was told to cross her legs. When that, unsurprisingly, didn’t work, the nurse forcibly held the baby in the birth canal for two hours, leading her to be deprived of oxygen.

As Rosemary grew up her parents felt that she was different from the other Kennedys. She was slower to walk and talk, and at a young age she was labelled a “moron” by the Binet intelligence test, then seen as the gold standard. But she attended special schools — and even if she didn’t share the burning Kennedy ambition, her life was full and happy in other ways. Her mother described her as “affectionate, warmly responsive and loving”, as always trying to please. Rosemary kept a diary, detailing tea parties and social occasions, a visit to the White House. “Of all the Kennedys, she had a particular kind of intelligence about her, and in many ways that becomes the heart of the piece,” says Irvine. “It examines how we value human life and this idea of the role of intelligence and what it is.”

“There are some very poignant bits of archive of Rosemary,” adds Netia Jones, speaking from her London studio. The “wild maverick of opera and theatre”, as Irvine describes her, is the director, designer and video artist of Least Like the Other. “One that we use in the show is her being presented at court when Joe was ambassador in London. She was a debutante and rigorously trained so as not to give away her specialness, her learning difficulties. It’s almost heartbreaking actually.” This was in 1938, when Rosemary met King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. By all accounts she thrived in England. In 1940 war forced the return of the Kennedys to the US — and matters took a turn for the worse.

Sent to a convent school, Rosemary reportedly had aggressive outbursts and would sneak out at night, attracting the attention of men. The nuns panicked; her father feared a pregnancy scandal. “She was very beautiful, and in a way her beauty folded into the tragedy of this story because she became quite unmanageable,” says Jones. “In the global picture and the Irish Catholic tradition there was a very specific role for women and girls. And in a family as ambitious as the Kennedys, the girls particularly had to fit in.”

Her father decided to act. “There was this fashion, it was like a craze: the lobotomy cure,” Jones says. Heralded as a revelatory treatment for mental illness and behavioural problems, it was pioneered in the US by Dr Walter Freeman and Dr James Watts. “The men who enacted these lobotomies had an extraordinary salesman-like quality,” Jones says. Freeman performed more than 3,000 in his lifetime, the majority on women, she notes, leading to hundreds of awful outcomes. The procedure rarely delivered what Freeman promised.

“Joe Kennedy believed that this was the right thing to do. He can quite easily be portrayed as a monster, but there are ambiguous aspects,” Irvine says. “A lot of people thought this was a miraculous ‘cure’, which is such a weird and shocking thought — that people need to be cured of being themselves.”


Rosemary was strapped, conscious, to the operating table, and two holes were drilled into her skull. She was asked to recite poetry and sing, so the doctors could check the progress of the surgery. They sliced the links between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of her brain; when she fell unconscious she had been cut her off from her former life. The opera ends at this point in Rosemary’s story: “We weren’t going to draw conclusions, we want to leave the interpretation to others,” Jones says.

It’s how Rosemary’s fate fits into the wider picture of attitudes to disability, medical practice, patriarchy, social and family pressures that really interests Jones and Irvine, rather than telling a straightforward biography or sensationalising the tragedy. “When you step back from it, it feels like a whole series of forces bearing down on her,” Irvine says.

“It was part of a very dark time in American history specifically, but also global history,” Jones says. “We were very close to eugenics and the idea of a kind of perfection — and the otherness of anybody who didn’t quite fit into these moulds. It’s a horrifying instance of something that is actually very common in perhaps less of an extreme way.”

And why turn this story into an opera now? “This set of circumstances is still very relevant and that’s why we’re doing it. These are things that still require extreme exploration, at this time in history when to be a young woman is almost overwhelming. In the United States suddenly you’re not in control of your own body and you’re being forced to have a baby, whether you want to or not,” Jones says. “The question for any young girl is, who am I? What is this world I’m in? There’s extraordinary pressure on young women. And how far, therefore, are we really from the story of Rosemary Kennedy?”