The death of Thomas Kilroy at the age of 89 does not just mark the passing of a unique artistic voice but also represents a final curtain for an extraordinary generation of Irish playwrights who used theatre to reimagine the country in which they lived. In doing so they helped to bring about the very different place we know today.
Along with Tom Murphy and Brian Friel, Kilroy held up a mirror to Irish society which was often unflattering but always deeply humane. His first play, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, had homosexuality as its core theme, and was initially rejected by the Abbey, a theatre which he said in the 1960s “was not saying much to my generation”.
He would, however, go on to have a long and productive relationship with the Abbey, as a script editor, writer-in-association and board member. The theatre would produce many of his plays, including Talbot’s Box and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. He was also a central figure alongside Friel and Stephen Rea in the establishment and success of the hugely influential Field Day company, for which he wrote Double Cross and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre.
Despite a nomination for the Booker Prize in 1971 for his only novel, The Big Chapel, and a successful career as an academic, theatre in all its forms was Kilroy’s true medium, though not necessarily in a conventional venue. An adaptation of The Big Chapel was performed on the streets of his birthplace of Callan, Co Kilkenny in 2019, while in 2021 Druid staged an open-air production of his west of Ireland version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at Coole Park in Co Galway.
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Kilroy’s canvas was broad, ranging from contemporary social questions to the grand sweep of history. His dramatis persona included real historical figures from Constance Wilde to Lord Haw Haw, and he engaged directly with the great European dramatists from Ibsen and Chekhov to Pirandello. To all of these, he brought his own creative genius, his wordcraft and a deep belief in the transformative power of live stage performance.