8 - Murphy's Ireland

Summary

Writing Bailegangaire in 1984, Tom Murphy was conscious of the date, the year that Orwell (writing in 1948) projected as the time when everyone would live in fear under the panopticon eye of Big Brother. For the characters in his play, he thought, Orwell got it exactly wrong: these are lives that no one is watching. The impulse to bring to mind lost lives, to give voice to the voiceless, has been endemic in Irish drama of the last century. Yeats told Synge to go to the Aran Islands: ‘Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression’ (Synge, CW, iii, 63). O'Casey's tenement characters were the urban poor whom the early Abbey drama had ignored in favour of the rural peasantry. Behan brought to the stage for the first time whores and gays, a previously unseen prison population. And in the next chapter I will be looking at the efforts of Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry to call back into memory those figures from the beginning of the century, loyalists from north or south, whom the Irish national narrative has written out. What is distinctive about the characters of Bailegangaire, and its companion play A Thief of a Christmas, is that these are people re-remembered, the early Abbey peasantry whom the playwright himself had initially tried to forget.