What's playwright Tom Murphy doing rewriting a 19th-century melodrama? He has always believed in outsize characters and big emotions, he tells Stephen Dixon
Some 40 years ago, Tom Murphy was in London, warbling a song that had a chorus beginning, "Ooh, the fairies, whoo, the fairies", from the stage of the now-defunct Players Theatre, which specialised in recreating the atmosphere of old-time music hall shows. He was drinking a great deal at the time, he says by way of partial explanation.
"I had money for the first time in my life. At the drop of a hat - or the drop of a few brandies - I would break into song, and a guy named Ronnie Scott-Dodd came up to me and offered to be my agent. A few days later there was an audition at the Players Theatre, which needed an Irish tenor, and I got the gig. I think it was for two weeks. When it was over Ronnie wanted me to go and sing in the working men's clubs, but I don't think I would ever have had the discipline to be a singer and tour around."
It's quite a leap from green-waistcoated Irish balladeer - mind you, at 68 he's still in fine voice at private gatherings - to being one of the country's greatest living dramatists; only a hop, though, from music hall to Victorian melodrama.
Murphy's new play is inspired by The Drunkard, written in 1844 by W.H. Smith and A Gentleman. Although American, it helped pave the way for the more familiar great British melodramas - Maria Martin (or Murder in the Red Barn), Sweeney Todd, East Lynne and Trilby, and Irish plays by Boucicault and others.
For nearly a century, the melodrama, pure and simple (very pure and utterly simple), has languished in theatrical history's backstage skip. If these little morality tales are performed, it is usually as camped-up musical entertainment, a sneer at our less-knowing forebears, who felt no embarrassment in hissing the wicked squire and weeping as the heroine surrendered her innocence to him.
Melodrama's unction, sermonising, hypocrisy, sanctification of traditional values and florid, declamatory acting style now seem absurd, but if we agree with the dictionary definition of "sensational entertainment with exaggerated characters and exciting events designed to appeal to the emotions", then most modern action movies can be classed as melodrama.
Murphy has always believed in melodrama. "I believe in it because of the generosity of it, the bigness. All my life I've dealt with outsize characters and big emotions. Whistle in the Dark, which is probably my best-known play, is a melodrama. It's a cowboy, country-and-western set-up. I loved cowboy pictures as a kid, and the black and white sort of morality that they presented.
"Melodrama with substance is possibly the best form of theatre. Melodrama as a word became a pejorative, and rightly so in most cases, because character was sacrificed to plot and situation, and there was no time for development or motivation.
"And, of course, there was dreadful sentimentality in an awful lot of those melodramas. But if you think of other forms of melodrama - who used it? Shakespeare. Marlowe used it. The Greeks used it. The Catholic Mass is a miracle play. In this country, John B. Keane used it all the time, and I've used it.
"Mainstream modern English drama is frightened of melodrama. The emotion is there in the subtext, but I find a lot of English drama is devoid of emotion; it is very dry and passionless. Maybe in the Irish psyche we still go a bit for the emotional.
"Emotion comes first for me, then the spiritual, then the intellectual as a third and very last - and the intellectual would go more into the construction of the piece. Theatre shouldn't be the presentation of an intellectual process, which I think in some cases it has become."
Murphy came across The Drunkard almost by accident and, after tinkering with a new prologue for the piece, ended up extensively reworking the whole play, setting it in an Irish context and finding a number of situations that have great potency for modern audiences.
He happened to be present at a rehearsal space when b*spoke, the theatre company set up last year by his partner, Jane Brennan, and Alison McKenna, had gathered some actors for a read-through of the original play.
"I was the only audience, and there was a bit of chat afterwards and they thought The Drunkard was lacking, or wanting. They thought it was a bit twee, yet they wanted to do it, and somebody said it should have a prologue, so one of them started a prologue and it was left strategically for me to find, and one day I picked it up and it was pathetic.
"So I took up the pen and I did this and that, and I became hooked. I found it fascinating and challenging to create a piece in that style which would entertain a 21st century audience. It took seven months and five drafts."
The new version of The Drunkard is still based around a character from a well-off family, now called Edward Kilcullen, who has lost everything because of drink, except the cottage where he lives with his beautiful wife, Arabella, and child. Lawyer McGinty desires both the cottage and the wife, and plots Edward's final downfall.
But hold - who is this standing in the wings? It is the well-known deus ex machina Sir Arden Rencelaw, philanthropist and temperance preacher! Can he foil the schemes of McGinty and save young Kilcullen from himself?
The Drunkard is an intriguing departure for Murphy, who found getting the right tone presented the main challenge.
"I knew that if I started to create character to any degree it could sink the piece. My 20th and 21st century sensibility had to be watched, because I wanted to do a play in that style, but I didn't want to do something that was going to be a bizarre curiosity, or a parody. I suggested at rehearsal that I didn't think the villain should be leering across the footlights at the audience. In terms of the original Drunkard, everything is good or evil, but while I put my modern-day sensibility in check, I always find that black and white are both tinged with grey.
"Because of the nature of our country today - and I wasn't trying to make this a political tract, because it cannot be that - the State is corrupt and the Church is corrupt, and yet they represent good, and what is right, as against evil. So what is black and white; is there such a thing? Everyone in the country is aware that there is an epidemic of drinking going on as never before. Here's a generation of youngsters, boys and girls, and they're falling all over the streets. A lot of them become like animals at night. And I was aware of that as a theme - it was a piece that couldn't simply move from sentimentality to a bit of comedy."
Murphy talks about the unselfconscious innocence you can often detect in those who suffer from alcohol addiction. "I knew I would have to deepen things, while not moving the play into something it never could be. In the original there is a young hero, who is nice, who becomes a drunk. And he's redeemed, of course, at the end.
"I know people who are alcoholics, and many of them seem to be innocently themselves, and if you are innocently yourself you are not only a victim, you are a victim to yourself. That is an example of characterisation that the sweep of the thing can take. To me, as I rewrote it, it gave me the authority to do what I wanted.
"In the original, the hero is drunk up to his eyeballs in the first scene, but I gave more of a development to his descent, and when he goes into the jiggs, into the horrors, and he doesn't know where he is, or who he is, that becomes a surreal scene whereby elements of his past come back, sometimes as monsters, and he is haunted by them.
"Eventually, he appears to sell the cottage, and I hope people will gasp at a thing like that, a man selling the roof over his wife and child's heads. And, of course, it happens - there isn't a place in the world that isn't affected by alcoholism - but I had to present it in the sweep of melodrama."
While gasps of horror - and, indeed, bursts of laughter, for there are many funny passages in The Drunkard - are encouraged, Murphy is a little wary of the audience going for it too full-bloodedly and hissing the villain on his every appearance, like in the old days. Neither he nor director Lynne Parker have camped it up, and he hopes the audience won't do the job for them. "I think you could easily blow it if that happened."
Murphy has always collected old sheet music, and he has introduced four appropriate Victorian ballads - including the gloriously lugubrious Down Among the Dead Men - into The Drunkard, which will be performed live by Ellen Cranich and Helene Montague.
"I must say I like happy endings," says Murphy. "People think I'm a very pessimistic writer, but I think almost everything I've written has some life-affirmative element. All the same, melodrama certainly has the space to present melancholy, and I think I've come up with a few moments of decent melancholy."
The Drunkard premières on Friday (previews from Wednesday) in the Galway Arts Festival (091-566577, www.galwayartsfestival.ie) at the Town Hall Theatre (091-569777) and runs until the 22nd. It moves to the Everyman Theatre, Cork, July 25th to August 2nd; and Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, from August 5th to 23rd
Boo, hiss! The melodramatic tradition
Theatrical melodrama flourished from around 1830 until the first World War, and was kept alive until the 1950s by the extraordinary English actor-manager, Tod Slaughter (1885-1956), frog-faced star of lurid fare such as Sweeney Todd and Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn. Slaughter - invariably playing a villain whose blood may be blue, but whose heart was black as night - leered and sneered his way around for 50 years, and recorded his over-the-top performances for posterity in films such as Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), The Face at the Window (1939) and The Curse of the Wraydons (1948), which until recently turned up on British television from time to time, usually in the middle of the night on Channel 4. Slaughter had the knack of performing on two levels; the more impressionable might be frightened or thrilled, but his plays and films could also be viewed as uproarious comedy. Movie historian Denis Gifford wrote: "The blood of the melodrama ran red, yet such was the gusto of Tod Slaughter that his films never offended. Slashing throats or snapping spines, he weltered in his glorious gore, leering and chuckling, winking and nudging his audience to laugh along with him on the road to hell."