Theatre History Studies

In a more than fifty-year career of diverse creations ranging from productions at iconic international theatres to Broadway, Hollywood, and beyond, Irish playwright Tom Murphy carved a long journey to establish himself as one of world’s most vital and dynamic playwrights. Recognized as an invaluable cultural voice in the exploration of Irish identity, Murphy’s canon explodes assumptions of colonial, postcolonial, and an ever-evolving Ireland through a myriad of dramatic forms, structures, and voices.

Cementing Murphy’s cultural significance, Irish president Michael D. Higgins wrote in his official statement following the playwright’s passing in May 2018, “The importance of Tom Murphy’s contribution to Irish theatre is immeasurable and outstanding. We have had no greater use of language for the stage than in the body of work produced by Tom Murphy since his earliest work in the 1960s. His themes were not only those which had influenced the very essence of Irishness, emigration, famine and loss—they were universal in their reach.” This notion of “universality” represents the exciting launchpad for Nicholas Grene’s [End Page 250] extraordinary critical companion book, The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer. This wonderfully comprehensive “deep-dive” into the vast landscape of Murphy’s storytelling endeavors to analyze each of Murphy’s works—both major and minor—in the hopes of granting universal viability for the playwright’s work, not only to his native Ireland but to the world of theatre at large.

Grene loads the beginning of his work with an assertion that Murphy’s writing, particularly in comparison to his contemporary, the globally lauded Irish icon Brian Friel, is “understudied and undervalued” (xiv). Garry Hynes, artistic director of Druid Theatre Company, echoes this sentiment in the 2018 New York Times report of Murphy’s death, that non-Irish audiences often struggle with his plays because Murphy does not gift his audience easy thematic, narrative, or personal access points. Murphy’s plays are challenging for global audiences to penetrate because as Hynes states, he is “unflinching in his rage about the way things were. He wrote with a very raw essence.”

This rawness of essence sparks the subtitle of the work “playwright adventurer,” which identifies both the greatness and the challenge of the playwright in critique. Grene proposes that Murphy is an “adventurer” in that he discovers a story as it emerges and adapts form to fit this emergence rather than write to a predetermined style, outline, structure, or theatrical vocabulary. Through an exhaustive exploration of archival information as well as via significant direct interviews with the playwright himself, Grene guides us into the heart of a writer who follows impulse, delves into the visceral of the moment, and who does not need to know in advance where a story is heading to arrive at powerful catharsis. The author skillfully implies that the challenge for Murphy’s work in achieving “universality” lies in the sheer difficulty in pinning down the playwright’s voice. Murphy’s worlds jump from the page as individual moments in the playwright’s mind that transcend one voice and instead mine numerous the-atrical vocabularies, sounds, tones, and tools in the pursuit of complex truths.

Grene examines Murphy’s plays thematically rather than chronologically. He groups works under linking categories that denote important connective tissues that span Murphy’s career. This structure allows the reader to view Murphy’s narrative complexity through a lens of recurring questions, themes, and ideas rather than through a basic linear chronology. Further, by looking at the playwright’s creative process in crafting each story, the book’s framework observes Murphy’s work as incredibly political by identifying it as utterly personal. Grene sees Murphy’s work as universal because it is so universally human despite its often-localized vantage point.

The first chapter, “Retrospectives,” lays out the playwright’s biographical [End Page 251] information as well Grene’s key strategy of exploring Murphy’s process rather than just product. Through this refreshing method of analysis...