Michael Billington 

Which side are you on, boys?

Michael Billington is gripped by a brutal Irish play about family loyalties and clan violence.
  
  

Tom Murphy
Tom Murphy Photograph: Public domain

We love Irish drama in Britain. We revive Synge and O'Casey. We revere Brian Friel. We premiere Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. Yet there is one great living Irish dramatist who has gained only a precarious foothold in our theatre: the 66-year-old Tom Murphy.

Talking to Murphy at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, I was reminded of a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox. According to Berlin, who in turn was quoting the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Some writers, he suggested, relate everything to a single central vision; others pursue many, often contradictory ends. In that sense, Murphy is a fox at a time when our culture tends to prefer the unifying idea of the hedgehog.

Our relative ignorance of Murphy is ironic, since he spent most of the 1960s in London and had his first full-length play, A Whistle in the Dark, staged there in 1961. Its portrait of an uprooted Irish family living in Coventry caused a sensation, with Kenneth Tynan describing it as "arguably the most uninhibited display of brutality that the London theatre has ever witnessed".

Seeing it revived at the Abbey, in Conall Morrison's production, it strikes me as one of the great postwar Irish plays. But it is not the physical violence, more implied than realised, that makes it so shocking. It is Murphy's refusal to moralise. Murphy told me that the play sprang out of his knowledge of migratory Irish workers, their sense of betrayal by their homeland and the cult of violence that often surrounded them.

As a family drama, it is gripping. The pacific Michael Carney lives in Coventry with his rackety Irish brothers and his English wife, Betty. But the atmosphere of simmering tension is heightened by the arrival from Ireland of the patriarchal Dada and the youngest of the brothers; and when offstage battle is joined between the fighting Carneys and a rival clan, the Mulryans, Michael is forced to choose between his tribal loyalties and his adopted values.

What is startling is the way Murphy, while depicting the degradation of violence, also analyses its origins. In particular, he gives to Harry, the most brutal of the brothers, a magnificent speech in which he explains what it is like to suffer a lifetime's patronage by people like Michael. "Thick lads don't feel, they can't be offended," he cries with a raging despair.

Murphy's fox-like ability to pursue different themes makes him, however, an elusive writer. In The Gigli Concert (1983), also being revived by the Abbey, he wrote a fascinating Faustian drama about an Irish millionaire prepared to sell his soul in order to sing like the great tenor.

And in Bailegangaire (1985), which Murphy himself has revived in Dublin's Peacock Theatre, he extended his territory with a play for three women. A bedridden old woman, Mommo, rehearses a long-ago tale of a laughing competition staged between two villages. Only when she gets to the end of her tragic narrative can her two grand-daughters be released from the tyranny of the past.

I'm not clear whether it is about familial renewal or about Ireland's need to escape from its own historic myths. Perhaps both. But it does haunt the imagination. It also proves yet again that Murphy is a writer who has left his fingerprints on posterity: Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane was clearly influenced by its image of domestic domination and subservience. The paradox of Murphy, however, is that one of Irish theatre's proudest possessions is also one of its least-known exports. If he is a theatrical fox, then I suggest it's high time he were hunted down, in the nicest possible sense, by other countries.

A Whistle in the Dark and The Gigli Concert are in rep at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until December 1. Bailegangaire is at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, until October 27. Box office: 00 353 1-8787222.

 

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