The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene (review)

There are several challenges to writing a monograph about celebrated Irish playwright Tom Murphy (1935-2018). First, there is his prodigious output: twenty full-length plays, eight adaptations, six television plays, and one novel. While other writers have also amassed significant bodies of work, the sheer number and variety of dramatic genres making up Murphy's dramaturgy render neat categorization of his work difficult. From the realism of A Whistle in the Dark, to the expressionism of A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant, the history play Famine, the gangster noir of The Blue Macushla, the domestic drama The Wake, and the allegorical The Sanctuary Lamp, Murphy's dramatic oeuvre is purposefully referential, polyphonic, and frustrating for the writer hoping to describe a singular style as distinctly his. Finally, there is Murphy's practice of revising each of his works every time one is revived. Thus, many of his plays exist in multiple published versions. Yet Murphy's very mix of genres and stylistic approaches warrants Nicholas Grene's insightful analysis.

Significantly, The Theatre of Tom Murphy makes rich use of the Tom Murphy archive, which formally opened at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2010. Grene focuses his study on all of Murphy's original plays, supplementing his analyses with meticulous research into every draft, revision, and author note. The result is a nuanced study of Murphy's complex dramaturgy as a practice of revision, where his dramas are understood as literary texts, performance texts, and texts in revision. Where Grene succeeds most is in tracing and documenting the development of Murphy's storytelling and mapping his plays' shifting relationships with scholars and audiences. His book is an immensely valuable addition to the field of Irish theatre.

Grene organizes his study across eight chapters, beginning with the author's critical biography. The remaining chapters are grouped thematically, rather than chronologically. Chapter 2 traces the development of Murphy's first play, On the Outside (1959), and its companion, On the Inside (1974). The works are considered in relation to two other early works, A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant (1969) and A Whistle in the Dark, Murphy's early breakthrough hit of 1961. The grouping of these plays allows for a thematic consideration of the male characters having been shaped, as well as limited, by the patriarchal grip of the Catholic church, the class divisions rampant in the Irish economy, and the gendered nationalist discourse of the free state.

Chapter 3 considers Murphy's attempt to stage plays based on foundational periods of Irish history. While the focus of the chapter is on his major play Famine (1968), Grene links this with two lesser known works, The Patriot Game (1991), a commemorative play about the 1916 rising, and his wildly unsuccessful The J. Arthur Maginnis Story (1976), a spoof history about storytelling and the making of Guinness. Grene considers the relationship of staging "history" in the Active medium of theatre, and considers how the reception of such history changes as audiences are further removed from the historical events depicted.

Chapter 4 pairs The Blue Macushla (1980) with Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and documents Murphy's practice of revision. Grene provides valuable research into the extended eighteen-year genesis of Homecoming. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on themes of location and dislocation, with The Wake (1998) and The House (2000) demonstrating Murphy's use of the most Irish of mise-en-scènes, the rural domestic space. In both plays he considers how material acquisitiveness informs twenty-first-century ideas of Celtic Tiger Irishness. Conversely, The Sanctuary Lamp (1975) and The Morning After Optimism (1971) are not bound by specific temporal or spatial settings—The Sanctuary Lamp is set in a church (religion not specified) and Optimism is set in a forest. In both plays he creates theatre worlds in which time and history are not integral to the...