Voice and Violence in Murphy

Nicholas Grene

‘I was born with a voice and little else’ (Plays 3: 176) says Irish Man in The Gigli Concert, when JPW King asks for his life story.⁶⁹⁶ Of course it is not true: he is here mouthing the autobiography of his idol Benamino Gigli. Irish Man is not much of a talker, much less a singer. One of the symptoms of the crisis that drives him to seek the help of the ‘dynamatologist’ is the inability to say what he wants to say. When he tries to speak words of love to his wife, all that comes out is ‘Fuck you, fuck you … fuck you’ (Plays 3:185). One climax of the play comes in Scene Five, with the terrifying aria of weeping anger initiated by the words ‘I hate! I f-f-f-f-h-h-h-ate …’ The stage direction says:

A few whimpers escape … fixed, rooted in his position, he starts to shout, savage, inarticulate roars of impotent hatred at the doorway … developing into sobs which he cannot stop … He is on his hands and knees. Terrible dry sobbing, and rhythmic, as if from the bowels of the earth. (218)

(No-one who saw Godfrey Quigley perform this scene in the play’s first production at the Abbey in 1983 will ever forget it.) The mad, impossible desire to sing with the tender expressiveness of Gigli stands as antithesis to all this blocked and frustrated inarticulacy.

In The Gigli Concert Murphy reverses the standard national stereotypes. It is the Englishman King who is the fluent fantasist with the gift of the gab; Irish Man, who has no other name, is solid, practical, laconic. From his earliest plays, Murphy appears to be in reaction against the tradition of attributing to the Irish a native speech of flowing high colour. His people of Galway and Mayo are not gifted with Synge’s ‘popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender’. On the contrary, they speak a brutish and broken language, a halting dialect of stops and starts, rags and patches. It must have been this, among many other objectionable features, which led Ernest Blythe, custodian of conservative Abbey orthodoxy, to reject A Whistle in the Dark so emphatically.⁶⁹⁷

From his earliest plays Murphy seeks to give voice to the voiceless, to find a theatrical speech for people who mumble and mutter, stammer and shout. He contrives, somehow, to give an expressiveness of force and feeling to a whole variety of characters who are without fluency or conventional eloquence. For many of them, like the Irish Man in The Gigli Concert, the obstructed need for speech issues in violence. But that violence is more than merely the symptom of the blocked energies that cannot find expression in language. It becomes itself a language of the theatre. It is a language that persists through many of Murphy’s plays from A Whistle in the Dark (1961) right through to The House in 2000. In this essay, however, I want to concentrate on three early plays, A Whistle, Famine (1968) and The Sanctuary Lamp (1975) and to explore in them the range of different forms of speech and the interplay of voice and violence because I see in them developments that were to take Murphy on to the great achievements of the 1980s, including The Gigli Concert.

Originally it seems Murphy had A Whistle (The Iron Men in its first incarnation) beginning with a standard expository scene between Michael and Betty; in production it was decided that it would be more ‘arresting’ to begin with the sight and sounds of Michael’s brothers overrunning the couple’s house.⁶⁹⁸ Harry searches for a lost sock, Hugo sings as he hair-oils himself before a mirror, Iggy sits impatiently fully dressed waiting for the others, while Betty runs around trying to prepare the house for the arrival from Ireland of the father Dada and the remaining brother Des:

HARRY. (looking for sock). Sock-sock-sock-sock-sock? Hah? Where is it? Sockeen-sockeen-sockeen?

HUGO (singing). ‘Here we go loopey loop, here we go loopey laa’

HARRY. Now-now-now, sock-sock!

BETTY. Do you want to see if that camp-bed is going to be too short for you, Iggy?

HARRY. (without looking at her, pokes a finger in her ribs as she passes by). Geeks! (Continues search for sock.). Hah? Sockeen.

BETTY. Iggy?

IGGY. Are we r-r-ready? (Plays 4: 3)

In this burst of disconnected language, only Betty even attempts communication, and she is ignored by Iggy, insulted by Harry. As Murphy’s introductory stage direction has it, ‘all of them are preoccupied with themselves’. The inadequacies of language and communication are matched by their physicality. Iggy, the biggest and toughest of the lot, the ‘iron man’ of the play’s original title, suffers from a speech hesitation ‘in moments of tension’. His language is the most erratic, even down to the confusion of the gender of pronouns. Against Michael’s attempt to keep the young Des out of the fight with the Mulryans, he counters, ‘Let her (Des) do the choosing. Like Dada said, she’s no baby.’ (Plays 4: 28)

Des’s youth and shyness make him all but completely inarticulate, with a particular Irish squeamishness, when he tries to tell how he got into a row with two men in the lavatory of his first English pub: ‘Two fellas in the – yeh know, of the pub. And they were laughing, yeh know, and talking about – well, Paddies.’ (Plays 4: 22) Michael wants to shield his youngest brother from the life of the other siblings, to find a way upwards for him through education and a better class of job. But education for the likes of Harry, with bitter memories of humiliation at school, is the enemy. He recalls how the schoolteacher McQuaide asked round the class what the boys wanted to be when they grew up:

Some said engine drivers, and things. And Dada was then sort of selling things round the countryside. Suits and coats and ties and things. Well, just when he came to my turn, and I was ready to say what I was going to be, he said first, “I suppose, Carney, you’ll be a Jewman (pedlar). (Plays 4: 43)

It is with this exposure still rankling in his mind that Harry is driven to his most incoherent burst of rage when asked by Michael for his reasons for fighting:

MICHAEL. […] you’ve no reason, see.

HARRY. But, see, I have! I have reasons, see, all right! I’ll fight anyone that wants to, that don’t want to! I’m not afraid of nobody! They don’t just ignore me! (Plays 4: 44)

The self-contradictions, the significant double negative, ‘I’m not afraid of nobody’, suggest how pathologically inturned the anger is here. And Michael, for all his belief in education and social mobility, is just as much a prisoner of the self. His very attempt to express his aspirations to Betty breaks down into a sense of its impossibility: ‘I want to get out of this kind of life. I want Des – I want us all to be – I don’t want to be what I am.’ (Plays 4: 57) The sentence cannot find a predicate, so ends up banging its head against the wall of the subject.

When he first appears, the patriarch Dada appears to speak with a different order of formality. One notices that he addresses each of his sons by their full names, Henry, Hubert, Ignatius, Desmond as though lifting them out of their casual selves as Harry, Hugo, Iggy and Des. Unlike his sons, he is at least initially polite to Betty: ‘How do you do, ma’am! […] I hope we aren’t too much trouble, inconvenience.’ (Plays 4: 20) (There is unintended irony here, given the ‘inconvenience’ caused by the family to Betty in the opening scene.) Dada has at least a notion of the grammatical distinction between an adjective and an adverb, even if his self-correction sounds funny coming at the end of a sentence so full of other mistakes: ‘If the Mulryans is bragging about what they’d do to sons of mine, then they have to be learned different. Differently.’ (Plays 4: 29). But his attempts to convince Betty of his high level of literacy in a drunken tête-à-tête at the start of Act III are hardly very convincing: ‘I bet you never read Ulysses? Hah? – Wha? – Did you? No. A Dublin lad and all wrote Ulysses. Great book. Famous book.’ (Plays 4: 60) And it is in this scene as he sinks to brooding on his own loss of status as a former Garda, that he produces the sudden unexpected outburst: ‘I hate! I hate the world! It all! … But I’ll get them! I’ll get them! By the sweet, living, and holy Virgin Mary, I’ll shatter them!’ (Plays 4: 60) As with the later Irish Man, the emotion of hatred is anterior to any object, any ‘them’ to be destroyed in revenge.

Violence is endemic in A Whistle, from the roughhouse of the very first scene. The effort of the sons, inspired by Dada himself, is to turn violence into heroics. The coming confrontation with the rival Irish gang, the Mulryans, is treated as an epic conflict, and when they return from the fight victorious, Dada is there to award them their prize: ‘I present ye, Carneys, with this cup – trophy – magnificent trophy – for your courage and bravery in the face of the enemy.’ (Plays 4: 67) They even have the parasitic hanger-on Mush to give a parodic version of a victory ode with his doggerel celebration of the achievements of ‘Iggy the Iron Man’. For much of the action, however, the violence remains offstage, narrated rather than acted out. Dada’s account of his battle with three unknown strangers, which prevented him from joining his sons for their fight against the Mulryans, is fairly evidently fictitious. His assailants in the backstreets of Coventry are own cousins to the imaginary men in buckram green with whom Falstaff combats in 1 Henry IV. Dada, indeed, is a tragic variant of the Falstaffian miles gloriosus, the boastful soldier.

The first actual assault we see in the play is when Michael is goaded by his brothers into hitting Betty, driving her eventually to leave their home. The triumphantly related battle with the Mulryans, itself a sort of civil war among the Irish immigrants for turf supremacy, is only the prelude to the vicious internal conflicts within the family itself. Harry punches Michael in revenge for his would-be superiority, his failure to recognize and support his brothers. A fight is engineered finally between Michael and Des, the other brothers egged on by Dada who needs to deflect a challenge to himself, needs to see his rebellious oldest son humiliated. Even though it has been prepared for theatrically, with Michael gesturing towards the use of a bottle as weapon at the end of Act Two, in performance the catastrophe always comes as a shock in its suddenness. As Des comes at Michael, he ‘hits DES on the head with the bottle. DES falls and lies still. Silence.’ (Plays 4: 86) The tragedy produces a realignment of the family, all the brothers one by one going over to join Michael by Des’s dead body, leaving the promoter of the fight Dada, standing on his chair, ‘isolated in a corner of the stage’. In the face of this silent and formalized tableau of mourning, the language of his self-justifying speech unravels:

Wha’? … Boys … Ye’re not blaming me. … No control over it. No one has anymore. … Did my best. Ye don’t know how hard it is. Life. Made men of ye. What else could I have done? Tell me. Proud. Wha’? A man must have – And times were hard. Never got the chances. Not there for us. Had the ability. Yas. And lost the job in the guards, police. Brought up family, proper. Properly. No man can do more than best. I tried. Must have some sort of pride. Wha’? I tried, I did my best … I tried, I did my best … Tried … Did my best … I tried … (Plays 4: 87)

The very failure to sustain any of these lying and clichéd evasions represents a sort of tragic pathos in itself.

The condition of people like the Carneys, Murphy believed, was not just a result of their own personal situation but of the history of Ireland stretching back into the nineteenth century. Inspired by Cecil Woodham-Smith’s popular history, The Great Hunger, he created his play Famine, and in a much quoted passage from the Introduction to the published collection in which the play appeared, he reflected on the long-term consequences of that terrible event:

the absence of food, the cause of famine, is only one aspect of famine. What about the other “poverties” that attend famine? […] The dream of food can become a reality – as it did in the Irish experience – and people’s bodies are nourished back to health. What can similarly restore mentalities that have become distorted, spirits that have become mean and broken? (Plays 1: xi)

Among the deprivations dramatized in Famine is a breakdown of language.

As the play opens, we hear the keening at the wake of the daughter of John Connor:

DAN’S WIFE. Cold and silent is now her bed.

OTHERS. Yes.

DAN’S WIFE. Damp is the blessed dew of night,

But the sun will bring warmth and heat in the morning and dry up the dew.

OTHERS. Yes.

MOTHER. But her heart will feel no heat from the sun.

OTHERS. No! (Plays 1: 5-6)

These are ritual forms for the collective expression of grief, the traditional verse forms and the antiphonal responses making it clear that this is not merely an individual personal lament.⁶⁹⁹ In the foreground we see the men gather and talk compulsively about the prospects of the potato crop – it is 1846, the second year of the Famine:

MARK. […] And – and – and I seen my own crop last year, and the stalks as black as – as – as – as …

DAN. And ‘twas the fog caused that.

BRIAN. Oh, yis.

LIAM. Ach!

MARK. Yis! And what’s on them in there now today but a few speckeleens the flies’d cause?

BRIAN. Oh, you could be right. (Plays 1: 8-9)

The interchanges here represent an attempt to allay anxiety, with Brian’s perfunctory assents the equivalent of the women’s responses in the keen. There is even a suggestion of verse rhythm in Mark’s line ‘And what’s on them in there now today but a few speckeleens the flies’d cause?’ that echoes the metrics of the mourning stanzas. But Mark’s language keeps juddering to a halt, and Liam (who will take a job as overseer for the villainous Agent) is already in dissent with his cynical ‘Ach!’ Under the fearful pressure of starvation the solidarity of the community will be broken and the attempt to sustain it with shards of shared language is evidently doomed to failure. One of Murphy’s great skills as a dramatist is to orchestrate into theatrical harmony a diversity of voices that, on the page, look like a cacophany of mere discordant sounds and linguistic gestures. The opening sequence of A Whistle, quoted above, is one example; the group conversations in Famine are another.

The village of Glanconor looks for leadership to John Connor, alleged descendant of high kings. When he is asked by Liam what the people are to do in the face of starvation, he replies:

What’s right!

The statement seems to surprise himself as much as it does the others.…

What’s right. And maybe, that way, we’ll make no mistakes. (Plays 1: 22)

It is to this one ethical imperative that John clings stubbornly throughout for all his baffled suffering. He is the very antitype of Dada in A Whistle; where Dada blusters, boasts and speechifies, John can only stand upright and silent. Dada foments violence to bolster his spurious cult of masculinity; John restrains the villagers who threaten to mount an attack on the corn-carts leaving the village and the policemen who guard them. This is in Scene Two, ironically entitled ‘The Moral Force’, for no sooner has John, by a mixture of authority and pragmatics, succeeded in quelling the potential riot than the zealous curate Fr Horan enters and, by his too vehement denunciation of the people’s mutinous anger, stirs it up again though in a different direction. Mickeleen, the Thersites-like hunchback fool figure who dares to question the priest’s assertion of ‘moral force’, is turned into a scapegoat and nearly lynched. Again it is only Connor, swinging a protective stick around him, who restores order.

Though it is just averted here, violence mounts through the play as it is bound to do. The O’Learys, Mickeleen and his giant brother Malachy, isolated and estranged from the community, are shown in Scene Six, ‘The Quarry’, ambushing two policemen to take their weapons, killing one of them in the process. Inevitably, it is the relatively well-intentioned magistrate, identified only as JP, whom Malachy murders with the stolen gun. By the end of the play he has disappeared, rumoured ominously to be ‘in America, a gang to him.’ (Plays 1: 89) If not a mere gangster, Malachy will become the sort of embittered Irish emigrant to spearhead the violent revolutionary movement of coming times. There is nothing John, by his dogged moral exemplum, can do to withstand this dynamic. Instead, he himself is rendered ever more desperate and beleaguered, evicted with his family when he refuses to accept the fraudulent assisted emigration scheme offered him by the Agent. His attempts to keep up hope in ‘the Policy’, or a change of heart on the part of the government, are increasingly unconvincing, and all he has left is something he refers to mysteriously as his ‘sacred strength’ kept in reserve.

By the climactic Scene Eleven, ‘The Queen Dies’, we are back where we started, but it is now Dan’s wife, who led the keen in the opening scene, who lies dead. And there is no chorus of voices to wake her, just the aged Dan himself, who rambles through a life-history: ‘What year was I born in? 1782 they tell me, boys.’ (Plays 1: 84) The cottage of the Connors has been levelled and what is left of the family is housed in a make-shift shelter. We hear Dan reprising the keen of the beginning, ‘Cold and silent is now your bed …’, filling in the responses as well as the lead verses. Simultaneously, in ‘a kind of trio’ of voices, there is an altercation between Connor and his wife Mother, who despairingly urges him to the action that he continues to resist: ‘Connor, will you move now, or are you still engaged, defying all, standing in the rubble of what you lost?’ […] ‘Don’t keep on.’ (Plays 1: 86-87) As the scene moves to its tragic end, theatrical attention remains divided between voice and action. On one side of the stage, lit by a fire, Dan can just be seen meandering away over the historical landmarks of his lifetime to imaginary hearers:

Aaaa, but the day we got our freedom! Emancy-mancy – what’s that, Nancy? Freedom, boys! Twenty-nine was the year and it didn’t take us long putting up the new church. The bonfires lit, and cheering with his reverence. Father Daly, yis. And I gave Delia Hogan the beck behind his back. I had the drop in and the urge on me. (Plays 1: 88)

In darkness at the other side of the stage, the secret of Connor’s ‘sacred strength’ is revealed, as he takes the action Mother has urged on him:

JOHN moves to the shelter. We hear the stick rising and falling. After a moment MAEVE rushes out of the shelter and off. The sound of the stick, rising and falling, continues for a few minutes. […]

JOHN comes out of darkness and walks off. He has killed his wife and son. (Plays 1: 88)

In the final scene, John has gone mad and it is left to Maeve, the survivor, to speak the epitaph: ‘There’s nothing of goodness or kindness in this world for anyone, but we’ll be equal to it yet.’ (Plays 1, 89) The world of the future which Maeve here faces is Murphy’s blighted post-Famine Ireland in which the drive for mere subsistence empties language and action alike of full meaning.

Murphy began writing out of his own situation, growing up in a large family in Tuam, with a father and brothers forced to work in England to make a living. In Famine he went back to explore imaginatively the nation-wide tragedy that had shaped Ireland as he knew it. But from early in his career, he reached towards a theatre that was not localized or representatively Irish. Already in The Morning after Optimism, written shortly after his arrival in England in 1962 following on the great London success of A Whistle, he used a non-Irish form of English. And in The Sanctuary Lamp, set in a ‘church’ with no country specified, the Monsignor appears to be English and two of the other three characters also have English voices. This is the more striking in the case of the strong man Harry because his real-life model, the boxer Jack Doyle was actually Irish.⁷⁰⁰ In the stage direction describing Harry’s speech – ‘an affectation in his sound (‘y’know?’ ‘old boy’ etc. – British officer type)’ (Plays 3: 101) – there is no indication that this overlays an originally Irish voice. The Jewish Harry is a total stranger to the traditions and rituals of the Catholic church into which he strays, and needs to be instructed by the Monsignor on the significance of the constantly lit sanctuary lamp. Maudie, the adolescent waif who also takes refuge in the church, appears to come from Northern England. At least one of her typical speech forms, ‘were’ for ‘was’ – ‘I think it were a few years ago’ (Plays 3: 117) – is characteristic of Northern dialects. Only Francisco, the venomously anti-clerical juggler, is unquestion-ably Irish.

If Murphy’s earlier Irish plays can be seen as post-Famine, The Sanctuary Lamp may be taken as post-Catholic, post-Christian. In the first version of the play, which caused so much controversy when produced at the Abbey in 1975, there was a Mass with a heavily satirized sermon by a modish guitar-swinging young priest making facetious jokes about the Holy Spirit.⁷⁰¹ In the revised text, this mockery of the spirit of Vatican II populism is removed, and the church becomes an all but abandoned space. Even the Monsignor uses the confessional as a place to keep cleaning things, and Harry upends it to provide a bed for Maudie and himself with church cushions and vestments as bedding. They both need to confess; Maudie in particular hopes for the absolution of ‘forgiveness’. Both of them, however, are completely ignorant of the rituals of Catholicism. It is as though Christian belief and doctrine has to be re-imagined from basics; the ‘sanctuary’ of the church becoming literally a place for homeless people, Jesus, embodied in the lamp, a puzzling presence to be interrogated about the meaning of the world.

Each of the three major characters speaks a distinctive language, an ideolect of their own. They reach out through speech across a divide of mutual incomprehension. Maudie tells of a night when her grandparents returned from an unsatisfactory film in the cinema:

MAUDIE. […] grandad come home, sad, with gran, from the ABC.

HARRY. They were unfulfilled.

MAUDIE. Sad. (Plays 3: 117)

Harry’s inflated synonym, incomprehensible to Maudie, hangs in the air with a significance beyond its context. Variants on a single meaningless speech tag are markers for the characters’ gestural efforts at communication. Harry’s hallmark ‘Y’know?’ is an interrogative sentence-ending, indicating a shortfall in articulation. So, for instance, he talks to the Monsignor of ‘This compulsion to do this – terrible thing. Y’know?’ (Plays 3: 102) With Maudie, the question comes at the beginning of the sentence as an invitation into a private world of her own: ‘do you know “dreaming”?’, ‘Do you know “lamp-posts”?’ (Plays 3: 117, 119) The quotation marks indicate the special meaning these words have for her that Harry cannot be expected automatically to share. When at the start of Act Two we finally meet Francisco, who has lurked around the edge of the action in Act One, he is in mid conversation with Maudie:

FRANCISCO. … Know what I mean? (MAUDIE’s face is blank.) (Plays 3: 128)

He also uses a post-sentence interrogative, ‘What?’ (Plays 3: 129) to encourage the understanding he has failed to achieve. For these lost people who know nothing securely, ‘Y’know?’, ‘Do you know…’, ‘Know what I mean?’ all represent an aspiration to the communion of shared knowledge.

Harry, Maudie and Francisco each speak a more or less private language of their own, with idiosyncratic scraps of speech and song. Harry tries to cheer up Maudie with the old Al Jolson number ‘When the red, red robin goes bob-bob-bobbin’ along.’ (Plays 3: 121) The much younger Maudie responds with the 1970s Kris Kristofferson song, ‘Put your head upon my pillow.’ Somewhere or other Francisco has picked up a knowledge of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, which he echoes in his greeting to his former circus partner: ‘For what reason have I this fortnight been a banished pal from my friend Harry?’⁷⁰² In typical Murphy fashion, the characters manifest their inner feelings in a cryptic code difficult of access for one another, or indeed at times for the audience. But in both acts, Harry and Francisco are given at least one opportunity to speak with the force of eloquence. Harry’s expository address alone to the sanctuary lamp, hesitant and fragmented as it it is for most of its length, culminates in a prayer for vengeance:

Oh, Lord of Death, I cannot forget! Oh Lord of Death, don’t let me forget! Oh Lord of death, stretch forth your mighty arms, therefore! Stir, move, rouse yourself to strengthen me and I’ll punish them properly this time! (Plays 3:112)

The invocation of Jesus, the life-giving Redeemer, as his opposite the Lord of Death, is matched by Francisco’s great anti-sermon from the pulpit, with its virulent denunciation of the priests, the ‘coonics’:

Those coonics! They’re like black candles, not giving, but each one drawing a little more light of the world. […] Hopping on their rubber-soled formulas and equations! Selling their product: Jesus. Weaving their theological cobwebs, doing their theological sums! Black on the outside but, underneath, their bodies swathed in bandages – bandages steeped in ointments, preservatives and holy oils! – Half mummified torsos like great bandaged pricks! Founded in blood, continued in blood, crusaded in blood, inquisitioned in blood, divided in blood – And they tell us that Christ lives! (Plays 3: 154)

The verbal violence of this fierce invective against a church that has turned the principles of its founder into its very opposite, with its echoes of Christ’s own denunciation of the Pharisees as ‘whited sepulchres’, is matched by the actual violence which threatens from the beginning of the play, the ‘terrible thing’ that Harry has contemplated, and which he prays to the Lord of Death to give him strength to accomplish. In grief for the death of his young daughter Teresa, Harry imagines killing his promiscuous wife Olga and Francisco, his cuckolding friend. His knife is out when he first hears footsteps in the church in anticipation of the appearance of Francisco in Act One, and he is goaded into hitting Francisco repeatedly in Act Two, when the juggler looks as though he is seducing Maudie away from the protective friendship she has struck up with Harry. Francisco defends himself against Harry’s knife with an empty altar-wine bottle.

In the event, however, Harry’s physical force is diverted into lifting the pulpit, the task he has repeatedly set himself and failed to achieve earlier, lifting it indeed with Francisco in it. The image of the strong man shaking the church pulpit has resonances of Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple on the Philistines. As such it is related to the anti-clerical iconoclasm that is one of the driving-forces of the play as a whole. But Harry’s recovery of his strength here, together with Francisco’s outburst of anger against the corrupt priesthood, represents an exorcism allowing them to move towards reconciliation, something like the ‘forgiveness’ all three characters need. In the last scene, Maudie falls peacefully asleep and the two men ‘have talked themselves sober.’ (Plays 3: 158) The ritual of re-placing the candle in the sanctuary lamp suggests a re-conception of the Christian religion of love, freed of its church institutionalization. In Harry’s case it is an imagination of heaven as the reunion of soul-silhouettes, perfected together: ‘And the merging – y’know? Merging? – merging of the silhouettes is true union. Union forever of loved ones, actually.’ (Plays 3: 159) Francisco has an equally beatific vision of the Limbo where unbaptized infants go: ‘With just enough light rain to keep the place lush green, the sunshine and red flowers, and the thousands and thousands of other fat babies sitting under the trees, gurgling and laughing and eating bananas.’ (Plays 3: 160) Their characteristically different voices express a shared Utopian metaphysic transcending the violent suffering that has tormented them throughout.

The first collection of Murphy’s three great plays of the 1980s, The Gigli Concert, Bailegangaire, and Conversations on a Homecoming, was given the collective title After Tragedy.⁷⁰³ It was an apt name for the new dimension to his work at that time. But in The Sanctuary Lamp we can see in retrospect that this was where his theatre was headed. A Whistle and Famine certainly are tragedies, tragedies all the more powerful because they show the impossibility of certain traditional features of tragic form. The tragic heroes of Greek and Shakespearean theatre articulate eloquently the significance of the suffering they undergo: that is what constitutes their heroism. Dada and the Carney sons in A Whistle are antiheroes in their inability to speak themselves, to resist the violence that grips them in default of speech, and which brings them inevitably to their tragic ending. John Connor is the stuff of which traditional heroes are made, but in a situation where his heroic qualities of leadership and resolution can be of no avail. His tongue-tied affirmation of the rule of right only ends in the horrible mercy-killing of his starving wife and son and his own madness. The situation in The Sanctuary Lamp gives us characters in comparable emotional extremities and, initially, as little able to communicate with one another. Yet they find through the play a self-expressiveness that releases them from the torments of their anguish and anger. In this it anticipates the movement of those later dramas that work through violence and tragedy towards some sort of healing through talking, singing or laughing.

Extract From: ‘Alive in Time’: The Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy: New Essays, edited by Christopher Murray (2010)

Cross Reference: Grene also on Barry and Kilroy

See Also: Talking About Tom Murphy, edited by Nicholas Grene