Nothing is certain about Tom Murphy. Nothing except that in an interview situation he is unlikely to speak glowingly of his childhood, or of anything else for that matter. "I'm sick of myself," he says with weary conviction. His plays are autobiographically-rooted, yet he doesn't favour personal anecdotes. Benign is not a word he brings to mind, not is romance or complacency. He's a tough guy, one of those characters that seem to have been born holding a cigarette. There is something unpredictable and stern about him, a certain psychological swagger.
Small and physical, he has a strong presence. It is as if he could either leap on to a table to sing at the top of his voice, or stand silently in a corner, watching. Author of several of the most compelling works of modern Irish theatre such as A Whistle In The Dark, Ballengangaire, Conversations On A Homecoming and The Gigli Concert, he is a challenging, intense, character.
Like him or not, no other Irish playwright has explored the complexities, contradictions and confusions of human behaviour as profoundly. Nor has anyone else focused as deliberately on re-creating speech as spoken with all its awkward fragmentation and sparse poetry. Risk has always been central to his work, as he says, "if you can do it why bother? If you can't, then try it". His characters experience the difficulty of emotional survival, or of merely trying to exist particularly within the tribal warfare of Irish family life.
His new play The Wake opens at the Abbey Theatre on January 28th. In it he has returned to the familiar tribal small town world of the Irish family as evoked in his only novel to date, The Seduction Of Morality from which it draws heavily. So it seems a play was lurking within that novel all along. The central character is Vera who has returned home from the US, summoned by death and a family dispute over property. Fostered out to her grandmother when she was a child, Vera has always felt apart from her family. Because of this, she appears to have created a romantic, utterly inaccurate myth about it. "Vera" he stresses, "is in pursuit of her family." Her sense of isolation is central to the plot. "I could be Vera," says Murphy, in the same way that he sees himself in several of his characters. Of her dilemma he says, "I don't know anybody who can face the idea of his or her own isolation".
Even by Murphy's savage standards, The Wake is a vicious portrayal of an Irish family. "I hope it's not too harsh," he says, "I often think I'm too harsh because I don't like sentimentality." Murphy is 62, looks younger, and when serious, has the slightly poised, even posed demeanour of an actor or a resistance leader. His delivery is slow and precise. "I'm instinctive, not intellectual", he says but his plays are psychological studies. He likes being honest, it seems to come naturally. He says: "I'd love to write radio plays, I'm intrigued by the disembodied voice, but I can't afford to". Interviews, let there be no doubt, as far as he is concerned, are things to be endured when there is a new play.
This new one also has elements of Conversations On A Homecoming and Too Late For Logic. For a man who appears to pride himself on his laconic remove, he is delighted with the way the actors have worked on this forthcoming production. "I'm not trying to sell the play," he says, "although I'd be delighted if it did well and sold lots of tickets, but it has been wonderful watching the actors in rehearsals. Actors create - it's wrong to consider them interpreters. They are creators. A play is a theory and they take a play, the words, and make something of it."
Murphy is at his most animated when discussing theatre and is an opinionated, passionate and fair critic. "I have seen over 3,000 plays. Of that there has been some 15 magical evenings, maybe 60 really good nights and a lot of stuff that left me cold." Greek tragedy has always inspired him, as has the work of Tennessee Williams, but his memory is full of wonderful performances he has seen, rather than specific plays. His belief in theatre is absolute and stresses his respect for actors and the hardship many of them experience, particularly those choosing to remain in the theatre. "Even a busy actor working here is lucky to make say £10,000 a year", he says, and then points to the large number of actors out of work.
Considering so much has been written about the healthy state of Irish theatre, Murphy, while managing to sound uncomplaining, speaks about the tension between theatre and film, the latter which offers so much more money to actors. "There is also the commercial aspect. People decide what is going to fill seats, and if a person is having a hard time in their own life, they probably don't want to go off to the theatre and watch a play about human agonies."
Concerned that it has become increasingly difficult "to get artists to do anything which puts their hearts and souls on the line" Murphy says "if the Government or the Arts Council or whatever are interested in having live theatre, they should do something about it". In common with views expressed by so many actors, directors and dramatists, he feels Irish theatre criticism is as yet undeveloped. "I don't see the point of writing sociological tracts that have nothing to do with performance." When The Gigli Concert was premiered during the 1983 Dublin Theatre Festival, the audience replied with a standing ovation. Critics were more guarded. At a press conference held the next morning, Murphy dismissed the reviews as "begrudging", "condescending" and "patronising".
Intense, demanding plays frequently lose out to easy theatre as entertainment. Of his own work he says, "I'm interested in emotional states, how people deal with feeling". Murphy agrees that plot and the more physical aspects of theatre have seldom been overly important to him. "I like sound, the words that are spoken." Even an "ahem" carries meaning. The conversations in his plays tend to be about life situations and about the delusions people invent to hide behind in order to survive. The importance of language as expression is understood - he makes no attempt to explain his use of it beyond referring to the importance of emotion and spirituality.
Music - particularly singing - excites him. Music and references to music feature throughout his work and several of his characters have turned to song at various crisis moments. Peggy, despairing of Tom's indifference in Conversations finally sings to conceal her embarrassment. Vera in The Wake uses song as a tactic. The Gigli Concert pivots on Man's bewildered belief in his need to sing like the great Gigli. Describing his earlier experience of performing, Man announces to King "like you can talk forever, but singing. Singing, d'yeh know? The only possible way to tell people . . . Who you are?" Murphy says he always wanted to write a play "about people sitting around and starting a sing-song". Isn't it odd, though, that the spontaneous song in real life often proves embarrassing. Murphy looks beyond this and stresses the valuable effort behind even the most casual rendering of a song "be it My Way or whatever" - the man in the bar, or at a party "has gone to the trouble of learning the words".
