One day at the dawn of the 1960s, a remarkable script landed on the desk of the director of the Abbey Theatre, Ernest Blythe.

Blythe was in his 70s. He had retired from politics almost 30 years earlier, and had been managing director of the Abbey for 20. His was a staid directorship, and the Abbey survived his reign on a diet of “forgettable and now forgotten farce, melodrama, and Irish-language pantomimes,” as the Dictionary of Irish Biography pithily records.

But this play was to be different. It was by a judge, first of all: Richard Johnson of the District Court, Tralee. And it tackled an issue of then rising controversy: the breaking up of families by the state-supported system of industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories.

Johnson’s play, ‘The Evidence I Shall Give’ (which receives an all-too-brief revival at the Abbey on April 26 and 27), told of a case in the district court of a small Irish town in which a 13 year old girl was the accused.

The girl and her younger sisters had been taken from their father when their mother died, and placed in an orphanage. They hadn’t settled well, and the eldest had made numerous attempts to run away. The Mother Superior had thus decided to separate the girl from her sisters and send her to a reformatory, and duly went before the judge to request a court order.

Administering his court in Tralee, Johnson had seen how the church and state conspired to wrench apart families, and how this system had brutalised children. And he saw through the hypocritical cant of the religious orders that claimed their actions were purely in the children’s interests, when they were heavily incentivised by the state’s capitation system.

In a key scene, Johnson’s hero, a lawyer (given the unsubtle name of Verity) challenges the Mother Superior on the capitation system. He calculates that the total annual grant to her order for the girl and her siblings would have been £780.

Yet the girls had been removed from their father after their mother died because “the father had no one to take care of them.”

“Will you agree,” the lawyer asks the nun, “that for £150 a year he could have got somebody to look after the whole six of them?”

If Johnson was an unusually compassionate judge, he was also a wily playwright. He wrapped his anger in a cloak of deceptively generic dramaturgy, adopting with alacrity the conventions of the Abbey plays of the day: gentle humour with a touch of farce; drama verging on melodrama; uncomplicated characters and a straightforward storyline.

Ernest Blythe was notoriously concerned with the bottom line: as Minister for Finance in the Cumann na nGaedhael government in the 1920s, he had cut a shilling off the ten-shilling old-age pension. At the Abbey, he placed audience numbers above artistic concerns.

He would likely have spotted, therefore, the revenue potential in Johnson’s play, with its form appealing to the Abbey’s traditional audience, and its content likely to engage a more progressive audience. But there was a problem. Johnson had gone too far.

Blythe, clearly, was prepared to tolerate Johnson’s questioning of the system, but he wasn’t prepared to tolerate Johnson’s answer. (Warning: plot spoiler follows.)

Johnson’s play culminated in a scene where the 13 year old girl removed a head scarf, to reveal her head brutally shaven, shocking the court: the Mother Superior had taken to it with a razor as punishment for running away. The judge duly ruled against the Mother Superior, refusing the care order, but the Mother Superior remained unrepentant: this was how she imposed discipline, and this was how she would continue.

As Johnson evidently saw it at the time, an individual injustice could be righted through the diligence of a humane judge and lawyer, but the injustice of the system would persist till tackled at more fundamental level.

This, it seems, was too much for Blythe. He insisted that Johnson change his ending and, pragmatically, Johnson relented. (This is recalled by his son, the former President of the High Court, Rickie Johnson.) The play that the Abbey staged – and which proved to be one of the big hits of its day – thus culminates in a saccharine and entirely unconvincing scene where the Mother Superior suddenly realises the error of her ways and is reconciled with the girl she had punished.

Even still, Johnson’s play stands out as a brave attempt to raise an issue that Irish society consistently failed to recognise and deal with, across another four decades at least.

The play is being staged in a rehearsed reading as part of a short season at the Abbey, titled The Darkest Corner, examining the issue of institutionalised child abuse.

With this season, the Abbey could be seen as returning to an issue it first flagged 48 years ago; then, Johnson’s play, which is mentioned in the Ryan Report, clearly chimed with the audience, but failed to provoke any national examination of conscience. This time, says the Abbey’s director, Fiach Mac Conghail, the theatre aims to ensure that the issue isn’t “buried in our amnesia”.

“If you go to the three plays in the season, and the accompanying talks, they will give you the sense that of course we knew as a nation what was happening.

“This will continue to seep through our conscience for generations to come.”