Making music of the spoken word

Bailegangaire (1986) - Directed by Tom Murphy - Peacock Theatre

First staged by Galway's Druid Theatre Company, with an iconic performance by Siobhβn McKenna in the role of Mommo, Bailegangaire is regarded by many as Murphy's finest work. Night after night, the senile Mommo tells the same story, but never reaches its conclusion. It is an account of how a laughing competition led to the naming of a town - Bailegangaire. Mary, Mommo's granddaughter, needs freedom from the past, and she urges Mommo to the end of her story - and, so, release.

Like The Sanctuary Lamp and The Gigli Concert, Bailegangaire has three characters, in this case all women. "For a man of my generation to write a woman," says Murphy (above), "it was like crossing national boundaries, or trying to write about another race of people. When I'd written Bailegangaire, I felt that they couldn't possibly be men."

Murphy is full of praise for his cast, particularly Pauline Flanagan, who plays Mommo and whom he calls "a truly great actress". He is paring back the set to a bare minimum, in order to focus on the performances.

"I would like, among other things, to celebrate the idea of acting. My particular interest has always been in mood, emotion, feeling. I used to say that I was attempting in what I wrote to create the theory that the actors would use to recreate the feeling of life.

"It has always struck me that the feeling of life is always somewhat constrained in real life by repressive aspects. The stage is the place not just to recreate the feeling of life, but to create the true feeling of life."

Murphy's staging will "move a little away from the realism that is usually associated with the play". He says his understanding of it has changed with the years and that the actors' contribution to it has transformed the "base metal" of his text into something "extraordinarily exciting".

Murphy has directed before, most recently for a festival in Chicago, although that was more than a decade ago. He says he is not "a working director" but wanted to direct this for the festival. As he says, smiling, "I didn't think anyone was going to turn my request down".

Murphy says each of his plays has its debits and credits. "The play I'm directing I have a fondness for. I like the language; I like the fact that it has above all the other plays a unity of action and time and place; but it also has the unity of gender, which I find very exciting."

I ask him what he considers his recurring concerns. "One is the search for home. The other is naked emotion, as near pure as possible, not sentimentality or country-and-western stuff. The other thing is the attempt to achieve some sort of musicality . . . There is an aspiration in my writing to write music for the spoken word, to make the spoken word into some kind of music."

The Gigli Concert (1983) - Directed by Ben Barnes - Abbey Theatre

First performed at the Abbey in 1983, to critical acclaim, The Gigli Concert focuses on the meeting of an Irishman who wants to sing like Beniamino Gigli and an Englishman who offers him spiritual advice and healing.

Ben Barnes (below), the Abbey's artistic director, whom Murphy asked to direct the production, describes it as a Rolls-Royce of the Irish canon. "The play is about two men in crisis and how they deal with that, and the way in which these two men bond and come together. It's a work that is very much part of the national canon, a canon that goes in this theatre right back to Synge and O'Casey. You can't underestimate the importance of Murphy."

When Barnes took up his post as the Abbey's artistic director, he came with the idea of the Murphy celebration in mind. For Barnes, Murphy seems to be the quintessence of an Abbey writer, if such a thing exists.

"This is essentially a writers' theatre, and Tom Murphy is one of the stars in our firmament. I've always felt that his work has had a profound influence on this theatre and on the younger generation of writers."

Barnes felt it important that any celebration of Murphy draw on a broad range of his work. While practical matters, such as finances and logistics, have meant the entire Murphy oeuvre cannot be staged, Barnes feels the selection represents Murphy's finest work.

"I think these are six of Tom's best plays, but I think that there are jewels in the crown that we are not visiting on this occasion," he says. "We do have limitations on the resources we can put into this season. We're producing as much as we could cope with within a two-week festival."

While operating within the universe of Murphy's script, Barnes says he has settled on a certain emphasis in his staging.

"In the way that we have set The Gigli Concert, I think that we are trying to lead people into the idea that this is not strictly a naturalistic drama. This has bigger, expressionistic, theatrical kinds of elements. The way we're going to light it and the way we're going to set it, these possibilities will be brought to the surface."

As Barnes considers The Gigli Concert a very difficult play to get right, he has taken five rather than the traditional four weeks for rehearsal. He says that, in acting terms, the play "is a real Everest", and that there is "something quite operatic about the work that requires a heightened style of playing".

As Murphy is well-known at home but less prominent abroad, one of Barnes's hopes for the season is that it will introduce Murphy to a wider European and world audience. He and Una Carmody, who is producing the Murphy season, have been canvassing producers to come and see the plays - plays that Barnes says are underpinned by a "tremendous, compassionate understanding of human nature".

A Whistle In The Dark (1961) - Directed by Conall Morrison - Abbey Theatre

The first of Tom Murphy's full-length plays, A Whistle In The Dark was rejected by Ernest Blythe at the Abbey and staged in London, in 1961. It concerns the Carneys, an Irish family who live in the English city of Coventry, and their cult of violence. For Conall Morrison, it marked Murphy out as a great playwright.

"He wrote it at nights, beside the range, back in Tuam. It's almost as if lightning struck, as if he was a conduit for a very potent force. It has the structure and the potency of a Greek drama but at the same time is very naturalistically set. It's still a domestic drama, but with huge tragic overtones. It is searing, severe stuff."

Approached to direct A Whistle In The Dark by Ben Barnes, the man behind the Murphy season, Morrison had never seen the play. Known for stamping productions with his directorial style, Morrison says his approach to staging A Whistle In The Dark has more to do with following Murphy's blueprint than with making a statement as a director.

"Tom is a very precise playwright. He writes the most telling stage directions, which are very elegant. The first step is to explore in great detail what he has described and to put that on the stage. There's no grand vision to be imposed on it."

Morrison's production will also be set in the early 1960s. While he says the play is very much "of its period", he adds that it still feels "incredibly fresh". This may be because of what Morrison describes as the play's perennial themes.

"It explores how family tensions can so easily spill over into violence, that there's no row like a family row," he says.

"The Carneys fight about what it is to be Irish in England, they fight about what it is to be yourself, what it is to have status. They fight over what happened in the past . . . all the family tensions come very rapidly to the surface."

Morrison says A Whistle in the Dark contains the concerns that have preoccupied Murphy in the 40-odd years of his writing life: "the theme of the outsider, of how to find yourself in a family or a society that is not accommodating your personal growth, the theme of how the soul survives in an alienating, austere, unspiritual, industrial society."

Large themes and a big play, then, in a production Morrison says will look sharp. "It has big themes and dramatic punch; it's physical and loud and muscular in all senses of the word. It should blow the back wall out, if I get it right."

The Morning After Optimism (1971) - Directed by Gerard Stembridge - Peacock Theatre

This play, from 1971, stands out in Murphy's work for its surreal style and less than traditional setting. James and Rosie are in a fairy-tale forest of the imagination, a place of transformation that makes possible an escape from the tyranny of the ideal to the real. Gerard Stembridge was attracted to the play "because it's set in a forest, and because there's a lot of fairy-tale action in it . . . Here is a play where Murphy has been very conscious of the visual and physical possibilities of the thing."

In the rehearsal room, Stembridge has constructed a dome-shaped climbing frame over the playing area; on the floor, turning inwards, are two spirals defining separate but intertwining playing spaces. With an actor such as Mikel Murfi on board, the possibilities for physical action are bound to be to the fore.

"I wanted the acting to move in different ways, to be above and below," says Stembridge. "I wanted the possibility of having people swinging out of trees, up and down and from above. The possibility is there in the text, waiting to be drawn out."

Stembridge, who acted in a production of the play 20 years ago, at university, says that although the style of the play is different, the authorial concerns are familiar. "Thematically, linguistically, you're into very familiar territory, but structurally and visually it will seem quite unusual for those who are more familiar with the plays that appear, at least, to be rooted in specific places - a pub, a house, an apartment or a place in the west of Ireland. This one is set much more in that kind of absurdist place: a forest. A forest of the mind."

The play's title, while beautiful, might suggest an outlook of resigned despair, but Stembridge says this is not quite the case. The abandonment of idealised fantasy and the journey towards reality are hard, but they offer a kind of redemption. "Tom's plays have a lot of Good Friday and not a lot of Easter Sunday. His redemptions are so hard won. But it is only when it is hard-won that it is worthwhile."

For Stembridge, Murphy "writes by far the best work for actors", but there is no denying that he is a difficult writer. And of his body of work, The Morning After Optimism is one of the more challenging plays to stage.

"I think it is one of Tom's more difficult successes as a playwright. The possibility of it going wrong in production is more than in some of his other plays," says Stembridge. "A lot of the other plays allow easier access for an audience. Because of the elements of magic and fantasy in The Morning After Optimism, because of the mix, a lot of concentration is required on the part of the production for it to be successful."

The Sanctuary Lamp (1976) - Directed by Lynne Parker - Peacock Theatre

Set in a disused church in England, The Sanctuary Lamp took a lot out of Murphy, who took a break from theatre for more than two years after completing it. It centres on Harry, a former circus strongman and English-born Jew; Fransico, an Irishman; and Maudie, Harry's troubled friend.

Lynne Parker says it has haunted her for years. "It's about the search for some kind of spiritual solution and the way that organised religion has failed people. How it does more harm than good. How, finally, we're all left stranded, looking for our own solutions."

Arguably, the characters are atypical for the Irish stage, Murphy having created a universe at a remove from naturalistic reality. "They are a bizarre little troupe: a circus strongman, a failed juggler, an oddball child and a priest who's on the verge of losing his faith. Each of them really is a victim of their own lives and the failure to find any kind of answer."

In Parker's staging, the audience will be on both sides of the playing area. Parker says she wants the audience as close as possible to the action, "to have that very intimate sense". Her other innovation is an emphasis on music. Other than that, she says, she is taking a straightforward approach.

"I'm asking, Who are these people? Why do they do what they do? He wrote it just after he came back from England, and it's set in England, and that's very deliberately where we're placing it. The one way that I'm bringing something different to it is in the music I'm using. It struck me that in a play about spiritual things, acoustic, organic instruments would lend something very particular to it."

She says the text remains fresh. "It describes the human condition, which doesn't actually change that much." While for Parker The Sanctuary Lamp is "classical, with a kind of Greek feel", she also says it is not an easy play, part of a difficulty she sees throughout the playwright's work.

"Murphy goes into the heart of the Irish psyche in a way that many don't find comfortable. He's a very challenging writer, with a very dark and bitter sense of humour. He puts it up to people. The kind of truth he's looking for, his questions, are not comfortable. He gets closer to the heart of it than most."

The Abbey's Murphy season runs from October 1st to 14th at the National Theatre, as part of the Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival. (Bookings at 01-8787222). It closes with a rehearsed reading of Famine (1968), directed by Patrick Mason