Leaving Conall Morrisons's sublime production of Tom Murphy's play A Whistle in the Dark at the Abbey Theatre last week, I was struck by the thought that Murphy has been one of our very few channels of real truth in this society throughout the whole of my lifetime. Everything else has, in some sense, lied - the media, upon whom we rely for self-knowledge and comprehension, most of all.
Media provide us with information, facts, but in a manner so saturated with invisible prejudices and ideologies that the meaning of this information, these facts, is decided in advance. A word like "fanatic", applied to a suicide bomber, seems to explain everything; in fact, it explains nothing. Only in the work of a great artist like Tom Murphy do we glimpse the possibility that such explanations are the beginning rather than the end of speculation. If Tom Murphy were to write a play about suicide bombers, there would be a character in it who would bandy around words like "fanatic", and we would instantly comprehend that this character was a deeply unreliable source of meanings or moral guidance.
For four decades, Tom Murphy has been presenting this society with plays about itself which go beneath facts, information, situations, emotions and even morality, to a place of possible common comprehension, if only of the darkness which unites us. His plays reach that part of the human imagination which is, in a way, beyond words.
Although I grew up just 23 miles from Tuam, where Tom Murphy first began to imagine the worlds of his plays, I was unaware of his existence until I was nearly 30. Then, encountering these extraordinary works, I was struck, as though by lightening, with the feeling that the ghost of Tom Murphy must have been following me around all the time, eavesdropping on my life and the most intimate thoughts and feelings which punctuated it.
I suspect there are many people still out there who, similarly, have not come to realise that these plays are more about them than almost anything else they will otherwise encounter in the realm of what we call culture. This is a tragedy at least as awesome as that depicted in A Whistle in the Dark.
One of the problems is that theatre is presented and - literally - consumed in this society as though it were just another form of entertainment, albeit one which, by virtue of the challenge it presents, compares badly with competing forms like cinema or bowling.
Media treatment of theatre does not help. Cultural commentators have acquired this extraordinary capacity to appreciate and celebrate artistic works which delve into the most complex and contradictory crevices of ourselves, while refusing point blank to make the necessary connection with real life. A newspaper review of a play which has confronted the darkest elements of human venality can applaud the works compassion, comprehension and vision just a column-inch away from a report of a tribunal hearing or a court case from which such qualities are manifestly absent. In the reporting of art, also, we suggest that it is a different thing to real life - more elevated, more interesting, requiring greater sensitivity or intelligence to comprehend. The language employed to "explain" Tom Murphy's plays is utterly different from the language of the plays.
Another problem is the social-status aspect of theatre-going. Most of those who go to the theatre happen to be the kind of people who feel they have, through background, opportunity or good fortune, escaped the realities which theatre might properly explore. They are cultural voyeurs, seeking artistic asylum. This in turn has given life to perhaps the most debilitating problem of all: that playwrights, like most other artists in the modern world, have allowed themselves to be policed by the notion that relevance is a kind of artistic death. Because so much of the audience is in denial about the possibility of art having direct relevance to its everyday existence, artists have to play this ridiculous game of pretending not to be engaged with their societies at all.
The role of the modern writer is to hand down tablets of stone from the mountain-top, eschewing any suggestion of a committed connection with reality as it is lived in the everyday. Writers live in terror of being dismissed as "social commentators", and spend so much of their energies reacting against this possibility that they often fail to make any connection at all.
This has all but paralysed Irish writing out of existence. It is a false dichotomy, having more to do with the limits of social commentary than the remit of art in the world. Artists, understandably, do not wish to become journalists; but this is more a problem for journalism than art.
In his essay, On Social Plays, Arthur Miller confronts the fallacies of this non-issue head-on, pointing out that in Ancient Greece, from where we inherited the template for our modern theatre, there was no distinction between the personal and the social.
The Greeks were unable to conceive of an individual prospering while his society did not. In what we call the modern world, the personal has become separated from the social, religious and political, in a manner neither inevitable nor healthy. Greek drama, however, offered a form of mass prayer, rendering tautologous the term "social play".
In this sense, all Tom Murphy's plays are social plays. Seeing they are about you, the least you might do is go and see them.