Tom Murphy has a pleasant laugh – slow, dry and warm – and he lets it punctuate his conversation. It has an engaging effect, unforced, short and syncopated: "Hah hah hah." Compared with the laughter in Bailegangaire, his 1985 play first produced by Druid Theatre Company, it couldn't be more reassuring.
The play, a masterpiece of 20th-century Irish theatre, describes laughter in terms both contagious and harrowing. “Costello clear had the quality laugh,” says Mommo, a senile grandmother, begrudgingly cared for by two granddaughters, who spends the play lost in an endlessly repeated but never finished story that also contains the seeds of their family trauma. It focuses on a laughing competition in a Galway town called Bochtán.
Towards the play’s conclusion, and the final, cathartic completion of her story, the sound that emerges from Mommo registers somewhere between a laugh and a sob – “Ih-hih-ih”. When Siobhán McKenna interpreted that sound in the original production, her performance became legendary.
In the early 1970s Murphy was contacted by Frank J Hugh O’Donnell, a critic and playwright who had worked in Murphy’s native Tuam. “He was a charming old man,” Murphy says in the elegant living room of his Dublin home, amid stacks of books. “He told me the story of a man, a stranger, who comes into a pub in Milltown one night where he heard a particular laugh. As usual in a company, there’s somebody with a particular laugh that is infectious. And he said, ‘I’m a better laugher than him,’ ” Murphy says, laughing. “It was wonderful. I stored it for 10 or 12 years, and I had to make up why he threw out the challenge and what could make them laugh all evening . . . I arrived at ‘The Misfortunes.’”
For a long time this story was just a tale to tell his children. It has now inspired three works by Murphy. In the same year that Bailegangaire premiered, the Abbey staged its companion piece, A Thief of a Christmas, the dramatisation of the laughter competition that Murphy contentedly remembers as "possibly one of the worst plays".
Before either of them, though, Murphy had written a script for a television play about Mommo and her sculptor husband, Seamus. Set in the 1950s, Brigit was broadcast by RTÉ in 1987. Last year Murphy returned to the piece and rewrote it entirely for the theatre. It will now be staged by Druid, in a production directed by Garry Hynes, and performed alongside a revival, featuring Marie Mullen, of Bailegangaire.
Instinct for stage
“I begrudge anything to prose fiction, television, film,” he says. “My instinct is for the stage. I get the most kicks out of that.”
Brigit is a remarkably lean and episodic work in which Seamus, a headstrong handyman, accepts a commission from the local church to make a sculpture of St Brigid. The spelling of her name is significant: as a saint she was called Brigid, but in her earlier incarnation, as an Irish goddess, she was Brigit. Seamus's task thus becomes one of artistic reinterpretation and realisation.
When the reverend mother describes Brigid as “not unlike the Blessed Virgin”, Seamus demurs for reasons of authenticity: “Brigid was one of our own, the Blessed Virgin was Jewish, a foreigner.” Although his home life is fraught with silence and miscommunication, the story of Brigid is rehearsed and detailed among them as he carves a piece of bog oak, determined to make something meaningful, or perhaps subversive, to rest in a church’s niche out of indigenous material and Irish myth.
Brigit sits comfortably within Murphy's ouvre in its depiction of embittered homes and church hypocrisy, but it is also a revealing and unvarnished portrait of an artist at work.
"I suppose there is an autobiographical nature in the three plays," says Murphy. "I'm really privileged to revisit so many of my plays. I could make my last will and testament on them," he says, again punctuating his words with laughter, "because I've clarified a number of points in Bailegangaire and, particularly, A Thief of a Christmas." Brigit, though, is more personal. "My mother had Alzheimer's. We called it seafóid or seafóideach. My father comes into Brigit largely."
Confronting the church
The story of making an artwork for the church had come from the experience of a friend, the late painter Tony O’Malley, who once furnished a parish with a statue. But it chimed with another tale that Murphy, the youngest of 10 children, had learned from his eldest brother. “He told me a story about my father, who had done work for the church, and the church short-changed him.” In retaliation Jack Murphy boycotted Mass, and his son laughs delightedly at the story of the protest, almost a signature combination of spirituality and economics.
Murphy has an equally complicated relationship with the church; he is a tireless critic of its failings, yet he has also depicted most sorrowfully the trauma of losing faith while seeking to reclaim the redemptive capacities of religion.
Like his father, Murphy has worked for the Catholic Church, in Tom’s case as a member of an international committee translating the Gospel from Latin. “When I got the invitation to become involved I was sick to death of talking about what they did to us and thought of trying something constructive,” he said several years later. “I had a naive belief that I might find some sort of salvation.”
Criticism of the church is still depressingly relevant. But the attempt in Brigit to reconcile something indigenous, the folk and the folklore, with an imperfect, broken institution that still has a redemptive possibility could seem like another attempt at some kind of salvation. "When writing this [Brigit] last year it was much more meditative and reflective than when I wrote the television script," he says.
Asked not too long ago why his late friend Noel O’Donoghue, with whom he wrote his first play, never became a playwright, Murphy replied, “He was too intelligent.”
“I don’t have an academic mind,” he says now. “Noel’s intelligence marked him out from the first to the last, so he couldn’t release the creativity in his self. Writing a play is not an intellectual process. I’m not sure what it is. But you have to have tenacity and concentration and discipline, and all these things will be rewarded. When I come to write a new play I wonder how I wrote the last play.”
Murphy, who turns 80 next year, has developed a tremor that makes it difficult to write. His agent offered to buy him a dictation machine to transcribe his speech, but he declined the offer, invoking the words of EM Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
Paternal reconciliation
In one sense Brigit has brought Murphy some reconciliation with his father, who emigrated in his childhood and whom he grew up without knowing. "I was thinking, I grew up without a father, but what about the father?" says Murphy. "He grew up without his family." There are few happy families in Murphy's work, and Brigit is no exception, but the "fambly" in Bailegangaire – haunted by the loss of one Tom and expecting the birth of another – might find their own form of salvation in storytelling.
As Murphy goes back to the source of his most revisited story I wonder if he feels that, like Mommo, he has finally completed something that otherwise seemed endless. It is tempting to consider the sparing and ritualistic new play as an example of later style, infused with folklore – he acknowledges the influence of Douglas Hyde's collection The Stone of Truth and Other Irish Folktales – but stripped down to its essentials.
“There’s a sense of it not being possible to go any further,” he says. “It’s satisfying when you’re at the top of the mountain, because you didn’t dream of getting to the first few hundred feet of altitude. If I live 20 years longer I’m sure that there would be alterations: commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons. I’m a writer, not fancying myself, but if there is a comma too many there it bothers me. I’m quite old now,” he says, laughing again, “so commas don’t bother me, apart from that they look like tadpoles and they dirty the script.”
Brigit and Bailegangaire are performed singly on alternate nights and together at weekends at Town Hall Theatre, Galway, from September 9th to 21st, before running at Clifden Arts Festival from September 23rd to 24th and Dublin Theatre Festival from October 1st to 5th
