Ireland: Murphy sees the glass half full

One reason for this is his never-ending sense of insecurity. Despite the fact that many regard him as the greatest living Irish playwright, he is devoid of self-importance. He talks of life as an unceasing struggle: with drink, domestic trivia and the truculent words on the page.

He pours two glasses of wine and reaches for a sheaf of papers. It is a transcript of an interview with an academic, sent to him for any corrections or additions he might have. His sense of duty prompted him to rewrite it.

The same appetite for work informs his latest play, The Drunkard. It is based on an eponymous Victorian melodrama that was popular in the 19th century. Murphy’s girlfriend, Jane Brennan, found a copy of it among his books — he had bought it in the 1960s, he thinks, but had never read it. Brennan and Alison McKenna were looking for a play for their company, b*spoke: Murphy volunteered to rewrite it.

“It was more or less an accident, how I came into the thing,” he says. “I thought it was going to be just a job of work. Then I found it challenging, and exciting. Quite frankly, because of autobiographical stuff, yes, but I’ve always liked melodrama. A Whistle in the Dark is a melodrama.

“One of the recurring themes (in my work) is a search for home, peace or harmony. Or God. And maybe it’s just death. But in that journey, ostensibly a simple one, eventually a home is reached.”

Murphy’s Drunkard retains the melodramatic skeleton of the original: a pure heroine, a wayward husband, a dastardly villain and a philanthropist who utters pious speeches. The latter, Sir Arden, is an ambiguous figure; to modern ears his relentless goodness is both risible and sinister.

“I found one occasion in writing it, a magic moment. Sweat starts to fall even on a cold morning, you feel the heat. And the material and the self is transcended. I wrote the equivalent of an epilogue, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with drink. It’s just four lines and they’re not necessarily wonderful to anyone but myself.

“Sir Arden says: ‘What joy can equal the sensations of a thinking being returned from futility?’ I suffer from depression; I know so many people who do. But they come out of it.The older I get, the word I apply to most people is longing. They’re longing for something. And through this form of a play, at least they come out of the longing for a moment and return to something that is harmonious.”

Music has always mattered to Murphy: it is no coincidence that he equates harmony with peace and transcendence. He chose songs for The Drunkard with care: but the devil, as always, gets the best tunes. A tavern scene with the song Down Among the Dead Men is vivid and alive; by contrast, the hymn-like dirges of the saintly heroine can no longer be taken seriously. Pastiche, he knows, is a pitfall.

“I suppose it’s impossible to entirely avoid it. But in bringing a modern sensibility to it, I impose whatever sort of personality I have on the piece.”

While staying true to the forms of melodrama, Murphy has infused the play with an ambiguity lacking in the original. Thus Sir Arden, the embodiment of kindly benevolence, is seen to have a sinister aspect. And McGinty, the villain, is given a speech where he declares his loathing of pious respectability.

These are Murphy’s own sentiments. “The word I hate most in my life is respectability,” he says. “Because that was toeing the line.”

There are many such nuances to The Drunkard: oblique but recognisable references to contemporary life, lines that briefly open a vista beyond the formulaic world of the play. A woman taken into care evokes a hidden landscape of repressive institutions. The young drunkard’s binge companions recall the violent alcohol culture of today.

“There are hints, shades. The play would be a completely different thing if they were pursued,” he says. “I put a speech into it about the generation we’re losing, the generation that is being turned into animals. I took a moment and went for it. But it is melodrama, it has a style: I’m not going to go into mini-skirted girls falling all over the streets.”

The sundered present is, of course, a recurring theme in Murphy’s work; as is the constant threat of nostalgia that the fierceness of his vision is always rasping against. He refers, jokingly, to the “decent bit of Christian fascism” that was a stabilising influence in his youth, despised in one way but valued in another.

“We bemoan the innocent times: possibly more brutal, but we knew where we stood,” he says. “The sabbath, attending church, religious duties — these duties punctuated the week for us.

“It may be the inability to live with reality and face what are called the real problems that one is meant to face as a son, a father or a citizen. And it’s like drink and creativity: creativity is a bit like sleep. I don’t want to know about buying a pound of sugar; I can’t take the day-to-day business. That’s not because it’s boring: but in an inadequacy within the self to deal with it. I too am cast in a role.”

Despite the plaudits that have illuminated his long career, and the satisfaction of seeing a retrospective of his work at the Abbey, Murphy remains, he says, deeply insecure. For a long time he refused to admit he was a writer; if anyone asked what he did, he mumbled in response.

“I escape into it. There’s the magic moment that one gets every four or five years; but the insecurity is terrible.”

He talks of tackling new work as though it is a daunting prospect: yet he must believe it is possible, that the thing which makes him a writer is still alive. He has a paradoxical attitude to his work: part diffident — “I’m still a bit surprised that people take me seriously” — part proud.

Murphy can be read politically, but his primary motives are personal. “I’m not a political scientist,” he says. “I absorb more than I observe.” He belongs to the ancient tradition of artist as shaman: a holy fool wandering the landscape of post-Catholic Ireland, seeking his accommodation with the sacred.

“Reality is hardly bearable to me,” he whispers. Drink and writing are both ways of escaping this pain. Of the two, writing works better in the long run: because, unlike drink, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Writers such as himself, he says, are driven despite themselves. “We cannot face reality. We prefer to take the chaos churning inside, whether that is rage, elation or love, desperation for a god. The chaotic nature of that eventually civilises it to such an extent that it transcends the self: and it makes sense.”

Making sense of life: putting order on a jumble of inchoate sensations. In Murphy’s mind it is both a high calling and a last resort. Despite years in London and Dublin, he remains a Tuam man. His work is an ambiguous thing: both a bardic calling and an escape from the real world of work. He puts himself through torture, year after year, partly to prove that writing is a valid pursuit for an adult. Then again, he asks with a shrug, what choice does he have? “I don’t think I can imagine not writing. I think it’s the only thing I can do. I used to think that about singing and music, but I wouldn’t ever have had the discipline for that. The rigours and demands of that life wouldn’t have suited me at all. Whereas the isolation of the writer’s life — I can deal with that. And indeed I like it.”

The Drunkard opens at the Samuel Beckett centre, Trinity College, Dublin, on Tuesday