Tom Murphy

Many playwrights in the 20 th century could not help viewing modern civilisation through Nietzschean filters, and Tom Murphy (1935 –) is one of them. In Bailengangaire (1985) Mommo and her two granddaughters, Mary and Dolly, find themselves in a desolate universe. This condition is similar to Nietzsche's nihilism – the meaninglessness of life – in his works. Mommo cannot find meaning in her life because of her dreadful past which contains the death of her grandchild and her unhappy marriage. Mary and Dolly feel homeless both physically and metaphorically and therefore, are lost in life. However, Murphy's characters manage to overcome their nihilistic condition by means of feelings and actions analogous to what Nietzsche calls art, passion, will power, the ability to reach their roots, laughter, and the acknowledgement of bitterness of life – the features Nietzsche outlines as primary to cope with nihilism. Mommo's storytelling, which becomes her art and passion, helps her to overcome her meaningless existence and to exert her strong will. It also reveals the fact that laughing at misfortunes and even death can minimize their dreadful effects and that suffering should be accepted as a part of life. Mary manages to bring meaning to her life by becoming passionate about Mommo's story and by accepting the fact that going back to the roots of their common problem can help them make a new beginning. In short, this article brings forth the affinity between Murphy's characters' meaningless existence in Bailengangaire and their endeavour to overcome it and Nietzsche's concept of nihilism and the qualities needed to get rid of this condition. Öz 20. yüzyılda yazarların çoğu modern dünyayı izlerken Nietzsche'nin bu dünyaya baktığı yerden bakmaktan kurtulamamışlardır. Bu yazarlardan birisi de Tom Murphy'dir (1935 –). Murphy'nin Bailegangaire adlı oyununda yer alan Mommo ve iki torunu olan Mary ve Dolly karakterleri kendilerini terk edilmiş bir dünyadalarmış gibi hissetmektedirler. Bu durum Nietzsche'nin eserlerindeki nihilizm – hayatın anlamsız olması durumu – ile benzerlikler taşımaktadır. Mommo'nun şimdiki hayatı, torununun ölümünü ve mutsuz bir evliliği içeren korkunç geçmişi yüzünden anlamsızdır. Mary ve Dolly hem fiziksel hem de mecazi anlamda " ev " kavramını kaybetmelerinden dolayı kendilerini anlamsız bir hayatta bulmaktadır. Fakat Murphy'nin yarattığı bu karakterler, hayatlarındaki anlamsızlığı bazı duygular ve hareketler sayesinde aşabilmektedir. Karakterlerin duygu ve hareketleri, Nietzsche'nin nihilizmi aşmak için gerekli olduğunu düşündüğü sanat, arzu, güçlü iradeye sahip olma, her şeyin köküne dönme kabiliyeti, gülme ve hayatın acı tarafını kabul etme gibi kavramlarla benzerlik taşımaktadır. Mommo'nun sanatı ve tutkusu hâline gelen hikâye anlatma yeteneği, yaşadığı anlamsız hayatın üstesinden gelmede ona yardımcı olmuş ve Mommo'nun güçlü bir iradeye sahip olduğunu da ortaya çıkarmıştır.

This piece was published in a collection of research edited by Dr John Cunnigham and Dr Sarah Anne Buckley.  The publication dealt with aspects of childhood in Galway, Ireland.  This piece is inspired by the lives of childhood friends, the renowned Irish playwright Tom Murphy and the engineer and philosopher of ideas, science and engineering Prof Micheal Cooley.  As young men they followed their own path and went on to pursue careers that had a profound effect on society.

This article considers the relationship between Druid Theatre's productions and its administration during the company's first decade by investigating the links between three features:  the company's fundraising practices; Druid's infrastructure development in terms of personnel and physical space; and the organisation's programming choices.  Druid's artistic partnership with Irish playwright Tom Murphy is also examined as it assisted in launching Druid's international touring when Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming was the first Druid production to travel outside of the United States/United Kingdom festival circuit.

Keywords: Druid Theatre, Tom Murphy, Ireland, funding, Irish theatre.

Through consideration of a single play, this study examines how an Irish playwright of a later generation engages with the legacy of Beckett. Tom Murphy’s 1985 play BAILEGANGAIRE is shown to adopt certain characteristically Beckettian images and structures, and to situate them within a dramatic action which involves agon at several levels. The younger writer’s engagement with the older emerges through an analysis of Murphy’s agonistic readings of these Beckettian figures.

The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the 'tinker', a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J.M. Synge's influential The Tinker's Wedding was pivotal to this 'Irishing' of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure's cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge's empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labeled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the 'tinker' fantasy that has shaped contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as lovable 'white trash' rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the 'tinker' is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognised.

Cathleen ni Houlihan’s resonant central image of the nation-as-woman/queen has become one that later generations of Irish dramatists respond to and critique. This exploration will suggest that this image inspired little respect in the drama produced by the conflicted post-war Irish in England in particular, who felt allegiance neither to the motherland they were obliged to leave nor to their adopted mother, Britannia. This outlook will be linked to the punk movement of 1970s Britain, which was arguably one in which the offspring of post-war Irish immigrants played a pivotal role and whose anarchist message was disseminated worldwide by a defaced image of Queen Elizabeth II. Such analysis will be used to contextualize the work of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who has been repeatedly labelled a “punk playwright,” and to suggest that the reduced “queen” of his most iconoclastic play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), negates both the female sovereign of the land of his birth and Yeats and Gregory’s seemingly failed Irish alternative.

Focusing on drama, and recent Irish drama in particular, this essay recognizes the problematic, even paradoxical, nature of the influence of Samuel Beckett and asks how later playwrights might be seen to react to, and work with, this influence. Beckett’s own response to the artistic presence of his own literary 'father', James Joyce, is described, and suggestive instances of infanticide in his own work examined. The essay goes on to identify those structural and thematic features in Beckett’s drama which are recognizable in the work of more recent Irish playwrights, and concludes with accounts of plays by Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Martin McDonagh which indicate how these writers revise, shape or contest elements derived from Beckett.