Tom Murphy's After Tragedy

Colby Quarterly Volume 27 Issue 4 December Article 5 December 1991 Talking, Singing, Storytelling: Tom Murphy's After Tragedy Nicholas Grene Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 27, no.4, December 1991, p.210-224 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Grene: Talking, Singing, Storytelling: Tom Murphy's After Tragedy Talking, Singing, Storytelling: Tom Murphy's After Tragedy by NICHOLAS GRENE When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing. (Beckett, on the reason Ireland has produced so many writers in the modem period.) 1 there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (Beckett, Three Dialogues [1949])2 or the figures in Beckett's endstates the expressive is a diversion, a need, a Fcompulsion, a doom. Pozzo offers to have Lucky "dance, or sing, or recite, or think" for Didi and Gogo and recalls how Lucky "used to think very prettily once, I couldlisten to him for hours."3 Nagg is bribed to listen to, Clov compelled to admire, Hamm's story, "theone," as Clov puts it, "you'vebeentelling yourself all your ... days."4 For Winnie in Happy Days, the story of Mildred and the mouse, and finally the long-postponed singing of her song, are among the last reserves in her repertoire ofdesperate stays against silence. Krapp's tapes reveal a receding series of earlier selves, each sneering at the performance of an inauthentic younger self. The urn-bound personae ofPlay endlessly repeat their roles as a compelled action which can never become for them "just play." The jet ofwords spewing from the mouth ofMouth in Not I is the ultimate evocation of the psychopathology of the expressive. Expressiveness in Beckett is the perverse human drive to fashion selves and worlds out of the void which is consciousness, a drive ineradicable and ineradicably false. Tom Murphy has declared repeatedly a confirmed antipathy for Beckett's dranla. "Beckett is my most unfavourite playwright and to the best of my knowledge I'm not influenced by him at all. .. As a prose writer I think he is magnificent, but I can't stand his plays. If I happen to be at one, I'm ready to applaud, clap, anything-providedit stops1"5 There is no reason for questioning Murphy's sincerity here: his is a very different imagination from Beckett's and a very different drama. Yet Beckett is such a strong presence in contemporary theatre that his principles and practice nlay be relevant even to a dramatist who 1. Quoted in I.e.c. Mays, "Young Beckett's Irish Roots," Irish University Review, 14 (1984): 20. 2. Quoted by Andrew Kennedy, Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 14. 3. Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 37. 4. Ibid., p. 121. 5. Quoted in Christopher Griffin, "'The Audacity ofDespair': The Morning After Optimism," Irish University Review, 17:1 (1987): 68. 210 Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1991 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 27, Iss. 4 [1991], Art. 5 NICHOLAS GRENE 211 vehemently rejects them as Murphy does. For Murphy too is preoccupied with endstates, with characters at or beyond the limits ofthe humanly tolerable. And he too is concerned, within such states, with the urge to express, its origins, its nature, its effect as perfonnance. This, then, is an essay on Tom Murphy with Beckett intermittently in mind: specifically on expressiveness in the three plays collected as After Tragedy: Conversations on a Homecoming. The Gigli Con cert. and Bailegangaire.6 Two impulses, contrary or complementary, can be seen in Murphy's career as a playwright. On the one hand, there is an impatience with the representational which has led to a series of experiments with non-realistic forms. He, like Beckett, has sought images freed from the dependence on a mimetic counterpart in reality, to speak for basics, essentials in the human situation. Hence the unlocated fairy-tale space somewhere between symbol and allegory of The Morning After Optimism (1971)7 or the no-person's-land of the church in The Sanctuary Lamp (1975). Against this essentialism, however, this rejection ofan art ofreproduction, is an impulse equally strong in Murphy to tell it like it is, to expose truths and realities-particularly ofthe Irish situation. From his first full length play, A Whistle in the Dark(1961) with its study ofthe culture ofviolence in the Irish emigrant community, through the horrors ofFamine (1968) and the comic deprivations ofA Crucial Week in the Life ofa Grocer's Assistant (1969), Murphy has tried to render honestly the experiences ofIrelandfrom which others might want to flinch away. Where Beckett turned his back on Ireland's "last ditch," Murphy has returned again and again to the specificities ofan Irish here andnow.Conversations on a Homecoming is one such return and takes the return as its starting-point.8 It is a deceptive play, hard to grasp, hard to handle. On the face ofit, a realistic night out with the boys, the study of a group, of the disillusioned 70s aftennath of the ideals of the 60s, an Irish dramatic equivalent ofthat undervalued movie The Big Chill. The setting is the dilapidated pub The White House, named at the time of the Kennedy enthusiasm of the early 60s by the proprietor JJ, who cultivated a (real or imagined) resemblance to JFK. The face-off of the play is between the returned emigrant, the failed actor Michael, bent on clinging to, reviving, the idea of the past centering on the absent and now alcoholic JJ, and Tom, the once would-be intellectual who did not leave and must justify his own paralysis by an aggressive and destructive cynicism. Many of the themes and figures are familiar enough from other modem Irish literature and drama: the psychology of the emigrant, leaving and returning; the stagnation of Irish provincial life; the inert domination of an alliance between Church and social 6. TomMurphy,A[terTragedy (London and New York: Methuen, 1988). All quotations from the-plays are taken from this edition (cited parenthetically in the text asAD which includes revised texts ofThe Gigli Concert (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1984), Bailegangaire (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1985), Conversations on a Homecoming (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1986). 7. Dates are of first production. 8. The play appears third inA/terTragedy, in chrqnological orderofperformance: it was produced in 1985, The Gigli Concert in 1983, Bailegangaire in 1984. But in so far as it represents a revised version ofan earlier play The White House (1972), and remains set in the 1970s, it is preferable to consider it before the other two plays. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol27/iss4/5 2 Grene: Talking, Singing, Storytelling: Tom Murphy's After Tragedy 212 COLBY QUARTERLY status quo; Ireland's failure to develop any sort ofadequate secular culture. The gombeen-man, the figure we have so long loved to hate in Ireland, is there in the personofLiam: "well-dressedandgroomed: expensive, heavypinstripe, double breastedsuit, a newspaper neatlyfolded sticking out ofhis pocketfor effect. He isafarmer, an estate agent, a travelagent, he ownsproperty . .. heaffectsa slight American accent; a bit stupid and insensitive-seemingly the requisites of success" (AT, 81). Missus, JJ's wife who runs the pub in his practically permanent absence, and who wants to capture Liam as a son-in-law, is equally representative, equally well-observed: "in her earlyfifties, carelessly dressed (a dirty house-coat); a worried, slow-moving drudge of a woman, senses a bit numbed by life, but trying to keep the place together" (AT, 82). For Irish audiences the play yields a delight in the recognition ofthe familiar, so vividly and precisely re-created. In this language is crucial. A dramatic shorthand allows Murphy to use the most casual phrases, ejaculations and exple tives, meaningless idioms and ideolects, to bring alive the texture ofa lived reality. Thus the ritual salutation ofMissus, "Aa, the boys," is heavy with nleaning in its inanity. Liam's use of "fellas"-"Good luck fellas"-which becomes more and more aggressive as he gets drunker and more resentful, hovers between demotic IrishandaffectedAmerican. Thereal skill inthis use oflinguistic gesture, however, comes in the build-up ofrhythmic interchange. Take, for example, the start-up of the reunion with Michael, reminiscence led off by Junior: JUNIOR: Jasus, you weren't home for ... TOM: Must be ten years. JUNIOR: That race week. (He starts to laugh.) TOM: Aw Jay, that Galway race week! They start to laugh. JUNIOR: Aw Jasus, d'yeh remenlber your man? TOM: Aw God, yes, your man! JUNIOR: Aw lasus, Jasus! (JUNIOR's laugh usually incorporates "Jasus".) TOM: The cut of him! JUNIOR: Aw lasus, lasus! LIAM: Who? JUNIOR: D'yeh remember? MICHAEL: I do. JUNIOR: But do yeh?-Jasus, Jasus! LIAM: Who was this? JUNIOR: Do yeh, do yeh, remember him? MICHAEL (laughing): I do, I do! JUNIOR: Jasus, Jasus. (AT, 83-84) Fatuous, vulgar, quite without content, the sequence is yet tellingly evocative: of Junior's role as the jolly nlan of the evening-Junior who is most endearingly really there for the beer, tortured by the slowness ofdelivery ofthe pints; ofthe group shibboleths of memory by which the disliked Liam is kept out; of the delayed drawing back in of Michael into the mood of willed gaiety. Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1991 3 Colby Quarterly, Vol.

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