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17. Thomas Murphy: The Madness of Genius 207 This paper was published by the Irish University Review in 1987 in a tribute edition to Tom Murphy. Tom Murphy is one of Ireland’s premier playwrights who has worked closely with the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Druid Theatre, Galway. He was born in Tuam, County Galway, in 1935. His first successful play, A Whistle in the Dark, was performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London in 1961 and caused considerable controversy both there and in Dublin when it was later given its Irish premiere at the Abbey, having initially been rejected by its theatre director. Considered along with Brian Friel as Ireland’s leading living playwright , his works have since been performed frequently in the West End and throughout Ireland, and he has influenced the work of younger playwrights like Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. In 2001 he was honoured by the Abbey Theatre by a retrospective season of six of his plays. A Whistle in the Dark, Famine and Conversations on a Homecoming were produced as a cycle by Druid in 2012, known as DruidMurphy, a story of emigration. The cycle toured to London and New York, as well as a nationwide tour of Ireland, before winning multiple awards at the prestigious Irish Times Theatre awards, at which Murphy’s A House, produced by the Abbey in 2012, was also an award winner. The Irish Times declared 2012 ‘the year of Tom Murphy in Irish theatre’. ART is triumph over the impossible. It is almost impossible to fulfil creative talent; in fact it is impossible, because recognition of talent within oneself seems to come hand-in-hand with a critical faculty. The artist has an awareness of excellence, of perfection always out of reach but attracting compulsively the focus of intense strife. It is towards perfection that the artist is drawn with a mystical sense of urgency and relentlessness. It is as if what he is struggling for is not his The Writings of Ivor Browne 208 but only something for the production of which he is responsible, something which he is charged to drag out into the light of day. You may call it perfection, source, or grace, if you will; and, once aware of its existence, how can the artist be satisfied with less? Whether agnostic or atheistic, the artist strives towards perfection as the goal of life. His work seldom comes close enough to his goal or his expectation of art’s potential to satisfy him. It is said of Charlie Parker, perhaps the most creative jazz musician of them all, that, when asked what he considered his finest recording, he replied, ‘Man, I haven’t made it yet’. This seems to be almost universally true of the artist, whether painter, poet or playwright. What he has done may be good enough, better than anything he has done before, even better than every other artist who has tried to do the same thing, but if he is a true artist it still will not be good enough. Perhaps that is why, when asked what he admires most, Tom Murphy points to children, God’s creation. Perhaps that is why he also marvels at pregnancy. He says he loves just to be near a pregnant woman, to experience the atmosphere which she creates around herself. Tom feels creativity is central to the life force. More than that, it translates life itself. When asked why he wrote plays, which are so difficult to write, ‘in retrospect, impossible tasks’, Tom Murphy replied: ‘It’s my way of answering back’. Answering whom, or what? ‘Everything’, he said.1 The truly creative writer has to opt out of normality, leave the ‘nine-to-five logical brain’, to go down into the creative source. Artists never seem to know where what they find within themselves has come from. This seems to be, as has often been remarked, the aspect of genius comparable to madness, or near to madness. It comes from the same depth, the same level of awareness, the root of things, mysticism. Tom Murphy himself has told me that he does not know where the speech ‘Down in the forest’, delivered by Edmund in The Morning after Optimism, came from, nor does he understand to this day what it means: Down in the forest . . . I saw her. And my being fed to regeneration . And the meaning of everything became clear and unimportant. And once I closed my...

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