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ARTSCAPE: SO, how old is Tom Murphy? Fintan O’Toole, speaking about how Murphy is “one of the great contributors to the emotional GNP of Ireland over the past 50 years”, slagged the playwright about it being his 80th birthday, to much mirth. It was a lovely celebration in the Abbey this week, full of theatre people, of Murphy’s actual 75th birthday this week, and of the publication of a new book of essays on him (Carysfort Press’s Alive in Time: the Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy, edited by Christopher Murray). When Murphy himself, whose writing is ageless, came to speak he said O’Toole had stolen his joke; that he had wondered, in light of all the 80th celebrations there have been recently, for Jennifer Johnston, for Brian Friel, “they must think I’m not going to make it!”.
O’Toole said the impact of seeing a Murphy play for the first time – Bailegangaire, or The Gigli Concert, or The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant– was not to be matched, despite the depth you might find in subsequent productions, and talked about how Murphy’s work has the capacity to shape who you are as a person. “It’s the danger,” he said, and he quoted Murphy on the most important question to ask himself when writing a play – “what is at stake?”. Risk-taking and personal investment and willingness to place everything at stake was at the heart of his work. His “extraordinary courage and relentlessness and imaginative capacity” are seen in his “willingness to roll the dice with the entire house on the table, again and again”. Which is why Alive in Timewas the perfect title for the book of essays, because all human culture, all art, involves the familiar made strange, and theatre is the “conscious re-immersion in that basic fact”.
