AMID the stand-up comedy, children's shows, theatre, music and cabaret at the 2017 Great Yorkshire Fringe in York is a one-woman show inspired by the Kerry Babies scandal, when an Irish mother was charged with killing her two children in 1984.

"I saw it in London and it's very funny and heartbreaking," said Fringe press officer Kevin Wilson, recommending The Press to highlight Caroline Burns Cooke's And The Rope Still Tugging Her Feet, a darkly comic take on a time when "the most dangerous place to be in Ireland is in a woman's womb".

Presented by writer-performer Burns Cooke in The Tea Pot tomorrow at 7pm, the show opens with Leanne Grey standing accused of murdering a new-born baby in 1980s' Ireland, whereupon Burns Cooke adopts a number of different roles to tell Grey’s story of injustice.

Billed as "enthralling, unremittingly entertaining and life affirming", the performance begins and ends with the same prayer to underline the journey in between, brought to the stage by Burns Cooke and director Colin Watkeys, who evoke the humour of an Irish bar-room raconteur while applying a light caress to the grim facts.

Never seeking to preach or condemn, but to squeeze the heart with a glint in the eye, And The Rope is dedicated to women who have suffered at the hands of mistaken ideologies, particularly those who have suffered the loss of a child. "But it's also funny because the Irish, despite everything, are," says Caroline, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Southern Irish father, who were both "very Catholic".

"I was born in Kilburn, London, which is like 'County Kilburn', totally Irish, and I have a total investment in that world with a very strict Catholic background that was very repressive in every way. The schools were run on the lines of how you thought schools would have been run in the 1940s/50s, when in fact it was the 1960s/70s," she says.

Caroline recalls the Kerry Babies scandal being a small story in the English press but much bigger in the Irish media. "It was such a strange story and my memory of the English reporting was that it was used as a way to show how thick the Irish were," she says.

When she decided to write a solo show, she knew it would be this particular story. "As a person and as an actress, I'm totally attracted to the dark side, but everything in my life is pretty much mediated through humour, which is the only way to survive," she says.

"With a lot of Irish people, like with northern people, we're funny people, and I was hoping this play would have humour because although it's bleak, the Irish say things in a funny way. I can turn from humour to being serious very quickly, which is what I do I best, I've been told, in my acting as well.

"I'm not here to preach. I don't like polemical writing; I want to write about people, humanity, being human. If you want to preach, make a documentary."

Great Yorkshire Fringe presents Caroline Burns Cooke in And The Rope Still Tugging Her Feet, The Tea Pot, Parliament Street, York, August 1, 7pm. Box office: greatyorkshirefringe.com or on 01904 500600.