CULTURE SHOCK:TOM MURPHY'S latest play at the Abbey, The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant,comes all of 50 years after the premiere of his first, On the Outside.One of the remarkable things about the current moment in Irish theatre is that we have playwrights with careers that span half a century but who are still active, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
This is an extremely rare situation in theatrical history, and it is one that we should savour. For it produces something much more rewarding than mere celebration. It gives us imaginations that are still crazy after all these years. It gives us the special restlessness of those who have done it all but can’t stop doing it.
There's a glorious superfluity at work. It is unlikely that Brian Friel will write another Faith Healeror that Tom Murphy will produce another Bailegangaire.(Such is the horror of repetition that has marked both their careers that it is unlikely that either would do so if he could.) In both cases, it would take an extraordinary late masterpiece to substantially add to careers of such enduring distinction. What's left, oddly enough, is something we tend to associate with youth – experiment. Both Friel and Murphy have been formal innovators, but neither has ever been experimental. They haven't tried things out – they've achieved them.
Now, late on, there is the chance to try somewhat outrageous things. It is striking that for both Friel and Murphy this involves a theatre that aspires to the condition of music. Friel's 2003 piece Performancesis essentially a dramatic dance around Janacek's second string quartet – it is supposed to end with a playing of the last two movements in full. If a string quartet seems appropriate to the nature of Friel's imagination, opera has always been closer to Murphy's. The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrantis essentially an opera without music.
Saying this may, admittedly, run the risk of giving the wrong impression. The play draws on other forms of writing, too. It is partly inspired by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's 19th century novel The Golovlyov Family. It uses ribald songs and poems, including versions of John Wilmot and Heinrich Heine. It has, most obviously, points of contact with both Brecht's Mother Courageand Shakespeare's King Lear.
The central protagonist, Arina, is a matriarch who rules her menfolk with an indefatigable drive to accumulate wealth. Like Mother Courage, she loses her family one by one. Like Lear, she divides her kingdom and outlives her own authority. Murphy is still dealing, in other words, with a wider literary and theatrical tradition.
Yet The Last Daysis operatic in two senses. Its plot, like that of so many operas, belongs much more to the idiom of fable than to that of either drama or narrative fiction. It is not anchored in either time or place. The setting is "once upon a time in a provincial rural area". We are in the territory of folk tales. The place is neither Russia nor Ireland, but some fictional space contiguous to both. The suggestions of time are deliberately ambiguous. Joan O'Clery's brilliant costumes suggest a past but not quite an era. Arina wants a motor car but still uses a horse-drawn carriage. And time itself in the play is extensive rather than intensive – the action seems to unfold over a period of about a decade. It is episodic – the play is in 20 scenes, and the fact that some changes of order from the published text make relatively little difference says much for the elasticity of the structure.
Most importantly, there is Arina herself. In a playing with time that is superbly articulated in Marie Mullen’s performance, her age seems to bear no strict relationship to the sequence of the action. It is a function of psychology rather than of chronology – she is very old when she is beaten down by events and much younger when she asserts herself against them.
In opera, of course, this looseness of time, place and plot is bound up by the architecture of the music. Murphy’s experiment is to attempt to do this with the spoken voice. That he does not entirely succeed is perhaps less remarkable than the extent to which he does so. The operatic pitch demands a big, declamatory tone. The speeches are not dialogue but self-declaration. This has always been true to some extent of the verbal soundscapes of Murphy’s plays, but here he pushes it to an extreme. Most of the scaffolding of intimacy is kicked away and we are left with pure, unsupported expressions of character.
This is a risky business, and it certainly doesn’t make for the kind of neat, modest drama that dominates the stage at the moment. It is closer to the feel of the 19th century melodrama with which Murphy has always been fascinated. But, in a world of three-hander monologue-based plays, there is something tremendously invigorating about the big full-blooded, high-pitched, multi- character epic that Murphy serves up. Conall Morrison’s sweeping, pacy production (helped a good deal by Tom Piper’s ingenious and effective sets) embraces this epic sumptuousness in a style that might be called over the top. But it might more fairly be called a case of “over the top and into the action”. Mullen’s magnificent performance is certainly that of a diva, but she has the bearing, the energy and the voice to hit the high notes.
Crucially, too, the ambiguity of time and space that comes with this territory is not vacuous. It would be silly to reduce this fable to a straight metaphor for our times in Ireland, but equally so not to feel the resonances. Arina’s journey from peasant to property magnate and back again is not exactly alien to our own experiences. The essential subject of the play – the uses and failures of authority – is one that Murphy knows very well to be at the core of the psychic crisis in which we are plunged. “When they lose their sense of awe,” says one of Arina’s sons, “people turn to property . . . and religion”.