Tom Murphy

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Symposium, A Celebration of Murphy at the Abbey & Peacock (October 2001) being the 40th anniversary of the inaugural production of Tom Murphy’s first full-length play, A Whistle in the Dark (Theatre Royal, Stratford East), consisting in a six-play Murphy season in conjunction with an academic symposium held at Mairtín Ó Cadhain Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, TCD [see proceedings, infra].

Nicholas Grene, ed., Talking About Tom Murphy (Dublin: Carysfort 2002), 115pp., ill. ports. [incls. transcript of a interview between Murphy and Michael Billington (Guardian theatre-critic)); essays, by Fintan O’Toole (on Murphy’s writing methods); Chris Morash (on redemptive transformation); Shaun Richards (on use of Christian imagery to deconstruct Catholicism); Nicholas Grene (on The Gigli Concert), et al. [reviewed by Liam Harte, in The Irish Times , 9 Nov. 2002, “Weekend”, 2001].

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Commentary
D. E. S. Maxwell, Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (Cambridge UP 1984), writes that The Gigli Concert represents ‘the collisions between savage actualities of failure and despair and the solace or defence offered by human faiths, rituals, fantasies - most often their incapacities.’ (pp.162-63.)

Fintan O’Toole, The Politics of Magic: The Work and Time of Tom Murphy (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1987), writes: ‘In Tom Murphy’s work, however, damnation and salvation are not irreconcilable opposites; rather the former is a precondition to the latter [e.g. The Gigli Concert]’ (p.167).

Fintan O’Toole, ‘Facing the audacity of despair’, in The Irish Times [Thursday], 5 Oct. 2001, p.12; writes that Murphy writes ‘marvellously for actors’, citing Siobhán McKenna, Tom Hickey, Seán McGinley, John Kavanagh, and others [see infra]. He further remarks that Murphy fuses together the highly stylised story that the ancient, bedridden Mommo keeps telling but never finishes with the immediate personal and social concerns of her two grand-daughters, both disrupting the realistic setting and heightening the realism. Remarks of The Gigli Concert: ‘Murphy imagined the English cultist J. P. W. King and the despairing Irish property magnate who is his tempter and his accidental saviour in living Technicolor’, and speaks of the audience taking the same journey as King from ‘treating the Irishman’s desire to sing like the great tenor Gigli as an expression of dementia to seeing it as an obtainable, even inevitable goal’. On A Whistle in the Dark: ‘A stream of English theatre in the 1960s, passing through Pinter and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mister Sloan, springs from what Murphy does in A Whistle in the Dark: turn the apparent familiarity of domestic drama into an arena for ferocious psychological and physical conflict.’ Of the direction: ‘The way the opening moments […] brilliantly staged by Connall Morrison, almost tore apart the fabric of a naturalistic setting is a momentous declaration of intent.’ O’Toole speaks of the suitability of the Peacock stage and the intimacy it affords to The Sanctuary Lamp but, criticised the treatment of the ritualistic moments when Harry mimics the dance his dead daughter used to do and later lifts the church pulpit ‘after the biblical Samson’: ‘Here, these moments are oddly cramped and almost lost.’ Considers that Geraghty as Dada is ‘a cast too far against type to reach the almost gothic heights the play demands.’ The title phrase of this article is taken from the part of J. P. W. King.

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Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives of Modern Irish Culture (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1988), asserts: ‘Murphy has probed the dark recesses of modern Irish experience with unrelenting obsessiveness’ (p.161).

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Gerald Fitzgibbon, Historical Obsession in Recent Irish Drama’, in Geert Lernout, ed., The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama [Costerus Ser. Vol. 79] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991), pp.41-59, on Whistling in the Dark: ‘[...] when the Carneys, a tough Irish emigrant family, land in Coventry they avenge themselves for all the humiliations of their former lives in Ireland. The one member of the family who has tried to escape and form a new life for himself with his English wife, is inexorably drawn back into the old tribal pattern. The past wins and the play ends with one brother killing another. Dada, the author of the family myth of the fighting Carneys, may have been defeated, but the myth he generated has won.//Buried in the play is a deep ambivalence about tribal identity and individual authenticity.’ (p.57.)

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Christopher Morash, ‘Sinking down into the Dark’, in in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 3, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.75-86: ‘That basic, irreducible element of theatrical performance, the body of another human being, is thus revealed as the ultimate limitation on human freedom; at the same time, it is the only context in which such freedom makes any sense. / All attempts to stage the Famine enact this contradiction thorough the paly of presence and absence which is built into the heatre’s basic form. It is there in the tensions between those bodies standing before us in the immediate, physical present and the absent world of the offstage which holds time in abeyance, both as promise and threat, both as a utopian possibility for the future and as a reminder of human limitations inherited from the past. No attempt to stage the Famine, however, holds these elements in balance as clearly, consciously and powerfully as Murphy’s Famine. Murphy’s play reminds us that as we sink down into the darkened theatre during a staging of the Famine, it is this harsh dialectic, and not the easy sentimentality of an imagined sorrow, which must be reactivated, again and again.’ (p.84.)

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Maurice Walsh, review of The Seduction of Morality (1994), in Times Literary Supplement (8 July 1994): Vera, now a call girl in New York, returns to small-town home where her family are pillars of society; Tom is ‘proud of his morals. He loved them.’ Declan, brother-in-law, is ‘healthily disgusted in his role as bank-clerk’; the Imperial Hotel has been left to her, to their horror; finely wrought set pieces depicts the hypocritical code that sustains the family but eats away their capacity for love; not until Vera reconnects with her early life and her grandmother that she finds strength to free herself; set in summer 1974; shards of social history include graves in Industrial School and the brothers and sisters committed by their families.

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Patsy McGarry, interview with Tom Murphy, The Irish Times (15 Sept. 2001): ‘He likes to thing of himself as “writing music for the spoken voice” as “an aspirant composer of music”. This analogy of music crops up frequently in his conversation. “When I hear music, I hear an emotion. When I listen to a voice, I hear character”, he says. / “It is very exciting to try to find a pattern, rhythm, constraints, to find a symphony. / If seeking to recreated a mood, obviously the rhythm of what is being said has to complement that, but the problem is that punctuation is so sparse - the semi-colon (for instance) is ridiculous in a play - as against musical notation.”.’ Murphy speaks of the “nightmare” of writing involved in two ‘“rhythms”, one “slow and very circular”, the other “very fast”, not as “terrifying”, just “a fact.” Further, ‘This “casting of words together [meant that] until very recent times I could recite a play [on my own] from start to finish … because it was like a musical score”. He would “deliberately, frequently, mix tenses to ensure a line is energised; that the actor has to change gears and animate the line”. Murphy speaks of prose as something that he doesn’t find easy and remarks, “English has long been a mystery to me. I haven’t constructed a proper sentence since we started talking, and perhaps you haven’t either”. Dismisses -isms imposed upon a play and condemns the “false expectations” of academics, professing to be “an artist”; to write otherwise would be “masturbation or something”; A Whistle in the Dark, being about “the violence of the bloodknot”, was rejected by Blythe who disbelieved that the Carneys exists; The Orphans (1968) “an awful shit of a play, a terrible play”. Murphy still believes The Blue Macushla (1980) to be a good play; gave up writing in 1976 for two years and three months after The J. Arthur Maginnis Story [1976] and The Sanctuary Lamp; bought period house in Rathfarnham with 17 acres; returned with Epitaph under Ether (1979), a compilation from Synge; of theatre, he says, “in the evolution of drama, actors came first” and that he is “providing the score”, “the theory”; Murphy discusses a recent cover-article on Irish artists in Newsweek which poses the question, ‘If Irish artists thrive on misery how are they doing in Boom Times?’, and wonders why no young playwright has tackled the question, “serious money at what cost?”; “People can count their earnings in millions but I think they are still longing. Even if they are racing so fast there is some degree of numbness of the skull, ideas of being alive are still mysterious.” Find Beckett’s plays “very difficult to clue into” but admires the prose; working on adaptation of Chekov’s The Cherry Tree.

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Michael Billington, ‘An Irish fox waiting to be caught abroad’, in Guardian Weekly, 25-31 Oct. 2001 [“Theatre”]: article based in interview at the Abbey during Murphy revival (Oct. 2001). Billington quotes Kenneth Tynan on Whistle: ‘arguably the most uninhibited display of brutality that the London theatre has every witness’; on the Carney family in Whistle, Billington writes, ‘Murphy told me that the play sprang from his knowledge of migratory Irish workers, their sense of betrayal by their homeland and the violence that often surrounded them.’ Billington frankly remarks of Bailegangaire: ‘I am not clear if it is about familial renewal or about Ireland’s need to escape from its own historic myths. Perhaps both. But it haunts the imagination. it also proves yet again that Murphy … has left his fingerprints on posterity: McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane was clearly influenced by its imagine of domestic domination and subservience.’ Billington regards it as paradoxical that ‘one of the Irish theatre’s proudest possessions is also one of its least-known exports’. The article-title is based on Isiaih Berlin’s essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, based in turn on Archilochus’s say, ‘the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.

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Eleanor Margolies, ‘Violent Measures’, review of Tom Murphy, Conversations from a Homecoming (Gaiety Th., Dublin) and Marina Carr, Ariel (Abbey Th., Dublin), in Times Literary Supplement (8 Nov. 2002): Conversations on a Homecoming takes place in JJ’s pub - the publican a little like J. F. Kennedy - in the early 1970s, ten years after J. J. has called upon a group of young people to renovate his bar, telling it could become a “wellspring of hope and aspiration” in their East Galway town. The cast include Peggy, who takes singing lessons, Tom (Adrian Dunbar) who writes poetry and speeches, Michael (Conleth Hill) who goes to America as a would-be actor. Returning for the homecoming of the title, he joins the oters in stripping strip each other bare exposing J. J. as “dangerous slob”. Margolies remarks: ‘Murphy’s seamless exploration of disillusionment [...] has a surprising relevance now in Ireland, during the re-examination of what was achieved and destroyed during the boom of the “Celtic Tiger”. (TLS, p.2.)

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Heinz Kosok, ‘The Easter Rising versus the Battle of the Somme: Irish Plays about the First World War as Documents of the Post-colonial Condition’, in Irish Studies in Brazil, ed. Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra (Sao Paolo: Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005): ‘[Tom] Murphy’s The Patriot Game [1991] proved that even in the Nineties there was an audience in Ireland ready to underwrite the type of hero-worship [of the 1916 leaders] that O’Casey, some sixty years before, had set out to debunk. Murphy’s somewhat anachronistic approach can perhaps be explained by the fact that the play had its origins in a much earlier television script of 1966. By 1991, he argued that “the danger in the Irish Republic was as much one of ‘repressing’ the Rising from national memory as of glorifying it into a national illusion.’ ([Quoted in] Fintan O’Toole, Tom Murphy: The Politics of Magic, rev. edn. Dublin: New Island Books; London: Dick Hern Books 1994, p.151; here p.98; The Patriot Game listed in bibl. as 1991 [ibid., p.101].)

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Sara Keating, ‘An intimate portrait of power’, review of The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant, by Tom Murphy, in The Irish Times (30 May 2009), Weekend, p.8: ‘[...] Grand epic sweeps at society aside, The Last Day of a Reluctant Tyrant is also an intimate family play, as poignant a portrait of a family crisis as his 2000 play The House, or the savage 1963 tragedy A Whistle in the Dark. The matriarch, Arina, is the tyrant of the title. Once a lowly peasant girl, she married in degenerate, decaying aristocratic family and literally saved it from ruin. Now she is a bitter old woman, vying for power with her senile husband and contemptible sons. / Like King Lear, she must divide her kingdom, and like Lear, she must choose between her three children; in this case sons, each more reprobate than the next. As they disown her and leave her to fend for self, she must come to terms with the legacy of all her hard work and uncompromising living: the absolute corruption of her sons. There is the slovenly Stephen who drinks himself to death; the apathetic Paul, who literally gives up on life; and the despicable Peter, a masterpiece portrait of hypocrisy, who thrives on the misfortune and ruin of his brothers. [...] The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant follows her [Arina’s] fate to its bitter, impoverished end. Haunted by the ghosts of those she sacrificed for industry and wealth, she is left to account for herself. Like Dada in Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, who sees his sons turn on him as he has forced them to turn on each other, she is left to deal with the legacy of her own life: the sheer weight of its spiritual wastage. / But a tyrant can’t be wrong, in her own eyes at least: tyranny is defined by dogged self-belief. And so Arina will leave this world unrepentant and take whatever punishment is due in the life hereafter. She will not enforce her own claim on salvation, she says in the play’s closing lines, and yet Murphy still suggests that she might get it. There may be no comfort for her in this bleak, bleak world, but Murphy still believes in the possibility of her forgiveness in the next.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

Sara Keating, ‘A Sort of a Homecoming’, in The Irish Times (5 May 2012), Weekend, p.7. ‘Murphy came from a family of emigrants, with a lot of older brothers. He was the only one to avoid the fate of his generation, who were fleeing the economically and culturally depressed landscape of the 1950s in their thousands and seeking work abroad. But the success of A Whistle in the Dark inspired him to leave his secure teaching job in his hometown of Tuam, in Co Galway, and move to London to become a full-time playwright. Murphy wrote his next two plays amid the chaos of a city at the centre of the political and sexual revolution, but he continued to reflect the anxieties of the country he had left behind. By the time those plays were ready for production, the Abbey had entered a new era under the directorship of Tomás MacAnna, who staged the ambitious Brechtian drama Famine and the equally complex dream-play A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant in 1968 and 1969. Murphy moved back to Ireland soon after. [...] Murphy’s plays present a brooding vision of Ireland that is far from the nostalgic rural Utopia of the emigrant’s dreams. Family values are subverted by violence and dysfunction, Catholicism is “a poxy con”, and society is split divisively between the haves and have-nots, failing its young spectacularly. For Murphy’s disenfranchised characters, Ireland is like “a huge tank. And we’re at the bottom, splashing around all week in their Friday night vomit, clawing at the sides all around.” It is an uncompromising, often unpalatable vision far from the simplistic international stereotypes of the Emerald Isle. [...] (For full text version, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)

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Patrick Lonergan, at the Abbey Theatre Blogspot (24 Jan. 2011): ‘[...] Tom Murphy’s Last Days of A Reluctant Tyrant at the Abbey took on our two biggest problems: the obsession with property, and the way in which the Catholic church carried out, and colluded in, the abuse of the most vulnerable. Its central character Arina had “sold her soul’, we’re told. “Property, land, money. That’s all she ever thought of’, says her son – placing Last Days in the context of the growing number of Irish productions that present the Celtic Tiger years in terms of a Faustian pact (The Seafarer, Druid’s The Gigli Concert, Terminus, Freefall, and others). I thought there was some marvellous acting in Conall Morrison’s production. Declan Conlon and Frank McCusker should certainly be forgiven if they feel disappointed not to have been nominated [for Abbey awards]. So should Murphy himself: the play may have been flawed, but an imperfect Murphy play (aren’t all of his plays somewhat imperfect when first produced?) is still far better than a lot of other work.’

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References
Grattan Freyer, Modern Irish Writing (1979), incls. On the Outside [one-act play set outside a dancehall].

Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, eds., Sof t Day: A Miscellany of contemporary Irish Writing (Notre Dame/Wolfhound 1980), From A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects Bailegangaire [1236-65]; BIOG & COMM, 1307 [as above].

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Notes
Bailegangaire (1), Programme notes: toured by the Steeple Theatre Company, dir. Gerry Barnes [at Riverside Theatre, Coleraine, 1990] state that his earliest theatre venture was a collaboration with Noel O’Donoghue, On the Outside (1959), which received amateur production in Cork and a RTÉ broadcast in 1962; made his first major impact with Whistle in the Dark, Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, and transferred to West End; for Kenneth Tynan it was ‘unarguably the most uninhibited display of violence that the London stage has ever witnessed’; presented in Dublin in 1962, American premiere 1969, and nominated Play of the Year by Time. Besides TV plays, he wrote in London A Crucial Week, &c., first presented at the Abbey in 1969, and Famine, first staged at the Peacock and transferred to the Abbey [see memorial plaque in new Abbey Theatre bar]. Returning to Ireland in 1970 he wrote The Morning After Optimism. In 1974 On the Outside and a companion piece On the Inside appeared at Dublin Theatre Festival. Murphy made a highly successful adaptation of Vicar of Wakefield [n.d.] followed by The Sanctuary Lamp which proved controversial at 1975 Dublin Theatre Festival; defended vigorously by Cearbhail Ó Dálaigh [President of Ireland], as one of the three best plays seen at the Abbey after Juno and the Playboy. The J. Arthur Magennis Story, a ‘romp’. Murphy settled in ‘savannah lands of Rathfarnham and set about taming it’, taking time off from writing; adapted Liam Ó Flaharta’s The Informer for Dublin Theatre Festival in 1980; adapted She Stoops to Conquer to an Irish setting for the Abbey, 1982. The Gigli Concert, finished Christmas Eve 1982 and presented Oct. 1983 at the Abbey in the Dublin Theatre Festival, winning Murphy the Harvey’s and Independent Newspapers awards. Became writer in assoc. with Druid Theatre Company in Sept. 1983, leading to the presentation of four of his plays, Famine in 1984, On the Outside in 1985, and Conversations on a Homecoming also in 1985, originally written as part of The White House in the mid-1970s, it now became hit of the 1985 Dublin Theatre Festival. Bailegangaire, written for Siobhan MacKenna who appeared as the grandmother, Mommo, who tells the story of the laughing competition, opened at the Druid Lane Theatre on Dec. 5th 1985, in London on 19 Feb. 1986, and at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on 13 May 1986. A companion piece, A Thief of a Christmas was simultaneously produced at the Abbey. The poem quoted by Mary in the course of Bailegangaire is ‘Silences’ by Thomas Hardy.

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Bailegangaire (2); Siobhán McKenna created the role of Mommo; Tom Hickey and Godrey Quigley resp. played in the part of J. P. W. King and the Irish Man in the first production of The Gigli Concert; Seán McGinley played Harry in A Whistle in the Dark and John Kavanagh as Francisco in The Sanctuary Lamp on their first outings. During the 2001 revival, Pauline Flanagan played Mommo, Jane Brennan played Mary and Derbhle Crotty played Dolly in Bailegangaire, dir. Tom Murphy; Mark Lambert played J. P. W. King, Owen Roe played the Irish Man and Catherine Walsh played Mona on The Gigli Concert, dir. Ben Barnes; Declan Conlon played Michael, Clive Geraghty played Dada and Don Wycherley played Harry on A Whistle in the Dark, dir. Conall Morrison; Stephen Brennan played Harry, Frank McCusker played Francisco, Sarah-Jane Drummey played Maudie and James Greene played the Monsignor in The Sanctuary Lamp (dir. Lynne Parker); Mikel Murfi played James, Masmine Russell played Rosie, Laura Murphy played Anastasia and Alan Leech played Edmund in Morning After Optimism (dir. Gerry Stembridge).

Birth-date? Anthony Roche cites Murphy’s birthdate as 1936 in ‘Murphy’s Drama: Tragedy and After’, Contemporary Irish Drama From Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995), pp.129-88.

“The Dubliners” & Murphy: In 1976, Tom Murphy wrote The J. Arthur Maginnis Story for the group whose members incl. Luke Kelly (m. to Deirdre O’Connell, founder of the Focus Theatre), Ronnie Drew, et al. The Dubliners performed as actors and musicians in Brendan Behan’s last, unfinished play, Richard’s Cork Leg, in 1972. (See Fintan O’Toole, review of Ronnie Drew’s one-man show, Irish Times, 4 March 2005.)

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Pauline Flanagan [interview], ‘Actress for All Seasons’ (Irish Times) (15 June 2002), Weekend, p.4: discusses her lead-role as Mommo in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire; notes that she starred in the first Druid production with Olwen Fouéré and Jane Brennan; strong Fianna Fáil background, with both parents serving as Mayors of Sligo; orig. from Fermanagh, driven out by pogroms; attended Ursuline Convent with Joan O’Hara; entered Feis Sligigh with Aileen Harte; palyed with Garryowne Players in summer of 1949 at Bundoran; spent three years with Anew McMaster’s company; her role as Mommo based on memories of Emma Fay, a woman who lived across the street in Sligo and whose laughter ricocheted off the walls: ‘what you have got there is her laughing at this terrible life she had’. M. George Vogel, whom she met while playing Juno in Washington; also played Rima in Dolly West’s Kitchen (McGuinness), winning her the Samuel Beckett Award and the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress; also appeared in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, leading to nominatioined for Irish Times/ESB Best Supporting Actress; parts in Portia coughlan (Carr); Tarry Flynn (Kavanagh); The Desert Lullaby (Jennifer Johnston/Lyric); A Life (Hugh Leonard); Outer Circle Award for Gradchild of Kings (Irish Rep. Th.)

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