Playwright, director and novelist Tom Murphy was a towering and much-loved figure in the Irish theatre and arts community - a complete man of the theatre.
Now a new event, Conversations On A Playwright, to be staged at Dublin's Lir Acadaemy, explores and celebrates the man's formidable oeuvre. Actor Frank McCuster, a Murphy stalward and one of the organisers of the event, writes for Culture about the man and his legacy.
I was rehearsing a play in Dublin in May of last year. My usual base was under renovation and Tom Murphy and Jane Brennan, friends for many years, invited me to stay with them. Tom was unwell in hospital at the time but it was hoped that he’d get out soon.
The basement of their house is a self-contained apartment - it was here Tom came to write. It’s a beautiful space. The windows look out, at eye level, to the gardens front and back. Tom’s writing desk and chair are there, surrounded by books. This would be my home for the next month. I felt a very privileged kind of strolling player.
Yet it would turn out to be the saddest of privileges. Tom died, suddenly, on the evening of 15th May. In rehearsal the next day the largely young cast, ten in all mostly in their early twenties, were clearly aware that a towering figure in the world of the profession they had just entered, had left the stage. Knowing that I had appeared in several of Tom’s plays and also that I’d had the privilege of his presence while rehearsing them,
they were full of questions. Full of curiosity.
Listen: Frank McCusker on the work of Tom Murphy, for RTÉ Arena
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Bearing in mind that they’d only recently completed their training, I was trying to think what productions of Tom’s plays they might have seen in this relatively brief period of time. Even with major playwrights, it’s very possible for three years to go by without any revivals of their work. It was not surprising then to learn that they had in fact only seen one - a recent production of ‘The Wake’ at the Abbey Theatre. What shocked me though was that they had not, in three years of training, engaged in any textual probing of his plays, save for their own extracurricular reading. I felt concerned that a gap in understanding of this rich, complex and, from an acting point of view, technically very difficult work, could be opening up.
‘No one is born with a gift to sing Bel Canto - God doesn’t allow it’ ...it’s a line, I think, from the novel Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.
Just as a great composer makes huge demands on their musicians so too does a great playwright on his players. In Murphy, as in Donizetti or Bellini, you need to know the score. It’s not enough to have ‘an ear’; an instinct, that talent is a given. You need something else - an acceptance that, to quote Bailegangaire, ‘no freedom without structure’. Murphy was rigorous about this. Obsessive even.
In a final run through in the rehearsal room of his play The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant, I had done my bit and was watching from behind as Marie Mullen give her final speech as the eponymous Tyrant. It’s a lengthy and extremely difficult piece and Marie was being magnificent. But in my direct view was Tom. He was transfixed on Marie, his mouth noiselessly articulating every breath, beat and cadence of his text. Marie was indeed obeying the form. She had, along with Tom, worked and reworked it, as no doubt she had other of his texts with him going back to Druid in the mid-eighties. Tom, you could see, was marveling at the ease she
had reached in playing. The freedom of expression she had achieved through her adherence to structure.
Truly visionary work will always find its way back to the stage. It is hoped that Conversations on a Playwright will help to ensure that a new generation of Irish actors will know the score when called upon to play it.
I could relate countless stories of this kind, as could any actor of my generation and before, lucky enough to have worked with Tom. He had a very particular way of being with actors. He relied on us and we certainly relied on him. Never pedagogical, his requests for precision were always sought respectfully, kindly, delicately almost - as if he were asking a favor, while giving us pure gold.
Thinking of actors like Marie working along with Siobhan Mckenna and Tom on Bailegangaire and of Sean McGinley and Ray McBride and Maeliosa Stafford - on to others in the Abbey 2001 season of Murphy and still more in recent premieres and revivals - it occurred to me that there exists an enormous cast of players whose knowledge of Tom’s work has been schooled under his watchful eye, and that perhaps the gap I was concerned about could be bridged if this older generation of actors could be brought together to share their experience and knowledge with these younger emerging talents. Jane, as well as Tom’s agent Alexandra Cann, thought it a good idea. We brought it to Loughlin Deegan at The Lir Academy TCD. He was full of enthusiasm. Along with producer Una Carmody and director Conall Morrison, we sat over several meetings and the initiative began to take shape.
Six senior actors would hold a week-long series of workshops/masterclasses with twelve emerging actors to explore the plays of Tom Murphy. Add to that, we would invite guest speakers such as Dr Nicholas Grene, Patrick Mason, Annabelle Comyn, Catriona Crowe and Garry Hynes. Orlaith McBride took our plan to The Arts Council and thanks to their generous financial help, Conversations on a Playwright will take place at the Lir Academy TCD from 1st-5th April 2019. It is hoped that further iterations of the project will happen biannually
from 2021.
Brian Friel has advised that the theatre should, ‘Eschew the fashionable ‘. Under poor artistic vision, alas, the theatre can at times be seduced by it. But truly visionary work will always find its way back to the stage. It is hoped that Conversations on a Playwright will help to ensure that a new generation of Irish actors will know the score when called upon to play it. And more, perhaps, build upon that knowledge and illuminate the work of our great Playwright/Adventurer for the audiences of the future.
Conversations on a Playwright takes place at The Lir Academy, Dublin, from 1st - 5th April - find out more here.
