Yesterday I finally booked a flight for the Dublin Theatre Festival which I will be attending on a trip organized by the Irish Repertory Theatre. In preparation for this trip I have been reading the massive two volume biography of William Butler Yeats by Robert Fitzroy Foster. I am currently half-way through W. B. Yeats – A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. However, one of the plays we might see is The House by Tom Murphy which will be playing at the Gaiety Theatre.
On the previous Dublin Theatre Festival I bought the book The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene at the Hodges Figgis book store. I have begun to read this book. I bought a Methuen Drama copy of the play The House because it was not in any of the collections of his plays.
“The House” is realistic play about an emigrant’s purchase of a house in his home town. The play addresses the tragedy of the Irish who have to leave Ireland to find work and the aspiration of one emigrant to set down roots back in his home country. Although the purchase of a house might not seem like the best subject for a tragedy, home ownership and the housing shortage has become more of an issue these days. There is an incident which adds to the drama of the emigrant’s actions. As I was reading the play I suspected he would get the money for the house by robbing the pub but the incident proved to be a little more unexpected. The use of working class slang from the 1950s and the UK made the pub scenes slightly difficult to follow. So it would be a good idea to have read the play before seeing the play.
Tom Murphy was a very versatile and eclectic playwright. He liked to experiment and did not try to repeat his initial success with Whistle In The Dark. I like to be philosophical about success. In my view, success can put an end to experimentation and creativity because the successful artist will just repeat his early success. While the successful artist will have made his mark in the world, this may not have been the limit of his potential. For example, if a playwright writes a smash comedy right out the gate, he may never attempt to write a tragedy. Tom Murphy did not have much success after Whistle In The Dark was a hit in London, which prompted him to move to London. It seems his work is primarily promoted by the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, Ireland.
So far I have read six of his plays. I was reading The Gigli Concert but I found a page missing in the Tom Murphy: Plays 3 collection so I had to order a copy of this individual play. Currently I am reading The Morning After Optimism. According to the The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer this play is a “dystopian fairy tale that has no particular bearing on Ireland; the pairing of the two couples, James and Rosie, pimp and prostitute, against their wish-fulfillment counterparts, Edmund and Anastasia, figured an innocence and experience clash freed from the specifics of a local setting”. I’m not sure if Edmund and Anastasia are meant to be figments of James and Rosie’s imagination or just their alter egos, but I think this is a clever idea for a play.
The concept of a “playwright adventurer” is appealing. I have already encountered the “scholar adventurer” in the book The Scholar Adventurers by Richard D. Altick. I like to think of myself as a cultural explorer even if I don’t have adventures. Travel always seems like an adventure and I am eager to encounter the strange aspects of an unfamiliar culture.
