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New Lamps for Old: The Theatre of Tom Murphy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Desmond Maxwell
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Extract

(i) A vision and a sense of place

Tom Murphy has responded with some incredulity to an interviewer's suggestion that he has written plays ‘about emigration’. The subject figures in some of the plays; Michael, returned from the exile his tales embroider (Conversations on a Homecoming);, the Carneys, immigrants in Coventry, making a precarious sanctuary of violence (A Whistle in the Dark); John Joe's unsettling meditations on departure from and attachment to his small town (The Fooleen, revised as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant). These are, on the face of it, situations familiar enough in the Irish dramatic tradition, from Padraic Colum's The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910). Murphy is not, however – nor, indeed, were Colum and Murray – evoking distresses measurable by newspaper editorials or the documentation of government reports. The literal emigrations are made to paraphrase emigrations of the self, interior journeys arrivine: at a goal or losing their way.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 57 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1990

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References

Notes

1. Interview in The Independent, 16 10 1987, p. 11.Google Scholar

2. Essays and Introductions (London, Macmillan, 1961), p. 341.Google Scholar

3. A re-working of The White House (1972).Google Scholar

4. The latest edition of The Sanctuary Lamp (Dublin, Gallery Books, 1984)Google Scholar is considerably revised from the 1976 text (Dublin, Poolbeg Press).

5. Friel, Brian, Abbey programme note to The Blue Macushla, 6 03 1980.Google Scholar

6. See Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions, p. 170Google Scholar, ‘Samhain’ in Explorations (London, Macmillan, 1962), p. 108.Google Scholar

7. O'Toole, Fintan, The Politics of Magic. The Work and Times of Tom Murphy (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1987), p. 172.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 16.

The following plays by Tom Murphy are published by Gallery Books (Dublin).

A Whistle in the Dark (First performance: Stratford East, 1961).Google Scholar

On the Outside (First performance: Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 1974; written, with Noel O'Donoghue, 1959)Google Scholar

Famine (First performance: Peacock Theatre, Dublin, 1968).Google Scholar

A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant (First performance: Abbey Theatre, 1969).

The Sanctuary Lamp (First performance: Abbey Theatre, 1975).

The Gigli Concert (First performance: Abbey Theatre, 1983).

Conversations on a Homecoming (First performance: Druid Theatre, Galway, 1985; originally The White House, Abbey Theatre, 1972).

Bailegangaire (First performance: Druid Theatre, Galway, 1985).