The Books: “Conversations on a Homecoming” (Tom Murphy)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

ConversationsOnHomecoming.jpgNext play on the script shelf:

Conversations on a homecoming, from the great Irish playwright Tom Murphy.

My dad turned me on to Tom Murphy, who is a major playwright, a major artist. You read his stuff and it’s breath-taking. People really don’t write such plays anymore – such ambitious and poetic plays – with social, religious, cultural themes running through. (However, the plays completely resist being pamphlets or propaganda. Maybe Tony Kushner is in the same vein – He certainly attempted that with Angels in America and succeeds on a ton of levels – but I don’t think Kushner achieves the universality that Murphy achieves. Murphy writes about Ireland, yeah, but he really writes about the human condition.)

Fintan O’Toole observed:

John Millington Synge wrote that “there are sides to all that western life, the groggy patriot/publican/general shop man … (that) I left untouched in my stuff. I sometimes wish I hadn’t a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on stage. God, wouldn’t they hop!” Tom Murphy has put precisely those sides of western Irish life on stage in these plays. The remarkable thing is that he does it without neglecting the soul that Synge feared losing.

Murphy’s plays wrench at the heart, and yet at the same time – they are not maudlin, or sentimental. They are the opposite: biting, comic, they move right alone – no malingering – a quick pace – overlapping – no dwelling on the tragedy – but tragedy suffuses every word.

The following excerpt is from Murphy’s play Conversations on a Homecoming. It’s a one-act – but it feels like a full-length.

It takes place in the 1970s, in a small town in the west of Ireland. There was a pub built in the town called The White House – built in honor of John F. Kennedy becoming president in America. The guy who built it – JJ – apparently was a dead ringer for Kennedy – and so, in those times of optimism for Irish people – that really meant something. But (and here’s Tom Murphy’s laser-sharp point) – that was all that JJ had going for him. He looked a little bit like Kennedy. In all other respects, he was a lazy drunken slob. When Kennedy was assassinated, everything changed – including the spirit of the Irish people who had gotten swept away by what was going on in America, gotten swept away by the optimism. Anyway – this is all just background. Very little of it is expressed in the play – but the feeling of gloom, and downright cynicism permeates the play. JJ (who is never seen) hovers above the action, he is referenced all the time – he still holds sway over the imagination … He is the character who had seduced them all with optimism (like Kennedy) and then shattered their hearts (Kennedy getting killed).

Michael – a boy from the town – had gone to America to try to be an actor. He has returned, still a young man, but a failure – and kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (He tried to set himself on fire at a party in Greenwich Village). But he’s putting on a good show, pretending like he’s a success, telling people he’s met Al Pacino, etc. He is dying to see JJ – because he wants to get swept away by optimism and glamour again. He wonders why everything is so bleak in Ireland, he wonders where all the passion went, where the culture has gone … Somehow, for him, JJ holds the key.

His friends, who never left, know better. JJ’s a drunk. He’s a lazy slob. He’s nobody to emulate.

Michael is a typical Irish stereotype: the guy who has left, and then comes back, with all kinds of romantic notions about what needs to be done in Ireland, what the next step should be …

Irish people have had to deal with that garbage for generations.

The old group of friends sit around in The White House pub, with a picture of Kennedy on the wall, and at first the atmosphere is jovial, friendly, pints being poured … a nice reunion … but gradually, the facades come off.

It’s a play of amazing power.

Again, from Fintan O’Toole:

Thus in Conversations the image of JJ’s desperate apeing of John F. Kennedy and of the long hangover from the 1960s in which the action unfolds, are real and immediately identifiable aspects of the social reality of a country which abandoned itself to American optimism and money in the 1960s and woke up in the 1980s to find itself on the wrong, rain-sodden side of the Atlantic. But JJ is also an image of the God who has abandoned mankind, the deus absconditus of modern philosophy, out on the batter while his worshippers mutter in his empty temple …

Converesations on a Homecoming is perfectly poised between despair and hope. The play is set in the backwash of an illusion, Ireland’s infatuation with American modernity as embodied by Jack Kennedy in the 1960s, and its characters are left with little to do but scratch at each other’s sores. But in Murphy’s work despair is not mere pessimism, but the essential prelude to hope. A spell of false hopes must be broken before an unfrozen life can begin to flow. Michael’s despairing of the absent JJ, his final break from the dangerous refuge which JJ provided, leads not to hatred but to love.

Here’s an excerpt from the play.

Tom is a great character, another classic Irish type: the bachelor guy who has been engaged to the same woman for 10 years. Tom still lives at home with his mother – has a brilliant mind … Everyone thought Tom would have been the one to get out. He has not. He’s a smart smart man. Do not feel sorry for Tom. Look out – cause he probably feels sorry for you. And rightly so.

Tom and Michael were once great friends. Now, with Michael’s homecoming, things have altered a bit. Michael has come home, and wants to shake things up again, wants to put a fire under people’s asses, get them proud of Irish culture again, get things moving again …

People always resent it when such comments come from “an outsider”, which Michael now is.


EXCERPT FROM Conversations on a homecoming by Tom Murphy:

TOM. Look, excuse me, Michael, but what is the point, the real issue of what we are discussing!

MICHAEL. Well, maybe I have changed, because my enjoyment in life comes from other things than recognising my own petty malice in others.

TOM. Is that the point?

MICHAEL. A simple matter — and it’s not a dream — of getting together and doing what we did before.

TOM. Is that the point? To do what we did before? And tell me, what did we do before?

MICHAEL. To do what we did before!

TOM. [to himself] Extraordinary how the daft romantics look back at things.

MICHAEL. Why is everyone calling me a romantic?

TOM. It’s more polite.

MICHAEL. You would never have made the statements you are making tonight a few years ago.

LIAM. I’d reckon, fella, that proves he ain’t static.

MICHAEL. It depends on which direction he went.

LIAM. I’d reckon, fella, that you are all — [washed up]

TOM. No. Hold on. I think you’re serious, Michael, hmm? I think he’s serious. I think we have another leader. Another true progressive on our hands at last, lads. Another white fuckin’ liberal.

PEGGY. Shh, love!

TOM. Home to re-inspire us, take a look at our problems, shake us out of our lethargy, stop us vegetating, show us where we went wrong —

MICHAEL. You’re choosing the words —

TOM. Show us that we’re not forgotten, bringing his new suicidal fuckin’ Christ with him!

PEGGY. Love —

MICHAEL. Vegetating, lathargy, forgotten —

TOM. And most surprisingly, I think the poor hoor — like his illustrious predecessor — does not know where he is himself.

MICHAEL. [laughs] I’ve been having a great time —

TOM. No! — No! —

MICHAEL. Marvellous time!

TOM. You’re too depressed, Jack, too much on the defensive Jack —

MICHAEL. Marvellous! But cheers anyway, Jack, cheers!

TOM. The point, Michael, the real point and issue for you, Michael — D’yeh want to hear? You came home to stay, to die, Michael.

LIAM. Correct.

TOM. And fair enough, do that, but be warned, we don’t want another JJ.

MICHAEL. [laugh/smile is gone] I never mentioned I had any intention of staying home.

LIAM. Correct.

MICHAEL. What do you know about JJ?

LIAM. Enough, fella. But leave it to me. I’ll rescue this place shortly.

MICHAEL. You spent so much of your time away as a student, the story was they were going to build a house for you in the university.

TOM. Michael.

MICHAEL. And you know nothing about JJ either.

TOM. I’m marking your card for you. JJ is a slob.

MICHAEL. He —

TOM. A slob —

MICHAEL. Isn’t.

TOM. Is, was, always will be. He’s probably crying and slobbering on somebody’s shoulder now this minute, somewhere around Galway. Missus in there treats him as if he were a child.

JUNIOR. [angrily, rising] And what else can the woman do?

TOM. I’m just telling him.

JUNIOR. [exits to Gents] Jesus!

MICHAEL. Why?

TOM. Why what?

MICHAEL. Why are you telling me — and glorying in it?

TOM. JJ is a dangerous and weak slob. He limped back from England, about 1960. England was finished for him. He could not face it again. I hope this is not ringing too many bells for you personally. And he would have died from drink, or other things, but for the fact that the John F. Kennedy show had started on the road round about then, and some auld woman in the town pointed out doesn’t he look like John F. Kennedy. And JJ hoppped up on that American-wrapped bandwagon of so-called idealism —

MICHAEL. He had his own idealism.

TOM. Until he began to think he was John F. Kennedy.

MICHAEL. And in a way, he was.

TOM. And Danny O’Toole up the road thinks he’s Robert Mitchum and he only five feet two?

MICHAEL. He re-energised this whole town.

TOM. And Danny O’Toole is winning the west for us? Then people started to look at our new slob-hero afresh. People like Missus in there — she pinned her hopes on him — and, he quickly hopped up on her too. And so, became the possessor of her premises, which we, and others, put together for him, restyled at his dictates into a Camelot, i.e., a thriving business for selling pints.

MICHAEL. No —

TOM. Alright, selling pints was a secondary consideration. Like all camelot-pub owners he would have welcomed a clientele of teetotalers. His real purpose of course was to foster the arts, to give new life to broken dreams and the — horn — of immortality, nightly, to mortal men … But then came the fall.

MICHAEL. The assassination.

TOM. Of whom?

MICHAEL. Kennedy.

TOM. Oh, I thought for a minute there you were talking about our president, JJ.

MICHAEL. Well.

TOM. What?

MICHAEL. Well, as I heard it, after Kennedy’s death, the character-assassination of JJ started in earnest.

TOM. No.

MICHAEL. Well, as you said yourself earlier, the priest’s visits, other people’s visits and the people the priest represented.

TOM. No. After Kennedy’s assassination, the grief, yes. We all experienced it. But is grief a life-long profession?

MICHAEL. A lot of people feared and hated JJ in this town.

TOM. Feared? No. Never.

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2 Responses to The Books: “Conversations on a Homecoming” (Tom Murphy)

  1. John says:

    Hmh. I noticed the same theme in the USSR in the early 90s – all these exiles coming back after living in realitve luxury in the West, telling people what to do after having forgotten how soul-crushing Communism was. Solzhenytsin’s a good example.

    Or exiles phoning home and kvetching about America and how uncultured their new homeland was. I remember one Lithuianian lady telling me about an ex-colleague who had gotten out and called back to say how horrible things were in the US. Then she said “well, I hear it’s bad over there [in the USSR], too”. My friend went off (to me, she was too polite to day anything to the boor). “We’re using ration cards for food and the Spetznaz just took over control of the media! Bad here too!”. Then a long string of Lithuanian expletives…

  2. red says:

    John –

    Also – at least with Ireland – a lot of the people who leave don’t want Ireland to change (even if change means progress. Just posted an essay I wrote about this very thing).

    The worst culprits are certain groups of Irish-Americans, who yearn for the green auld country of yore (which, sadly, also came with famine, backwardness, and strife) … but they do NOT want ireland to grow, succeed.

    They romanticize poverty.

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