Inspiring whistleblower of Irish psyche’s secrets

TRULY great writers enrich the lives of all those lucky enough to encounter their work. Playwright Tom Murphy, who has died aged 83, walked easily in such footsteps. He knew the full emotional landscape of the Irish heart as no other, and made himself a relentless champion of loss. Menace and fury were spliced through his works as he brought families devoured by haunting darkness to life. He took the torment of a tortured soul in a Tuam pub to the great theatres of the world.

The light that came through the broken windows of his world may have been refracted and distorted by pain, but even if it was, it was light nonetheless, and it could be up-lifting for all its merciless intensity.

The language of hunger, the anguish of emigration, absence and despair were the raw materials from which he crafted his inspiring and often brutally over-powering works.

His association with the Druid Theatre was a special joy to him. He once said that having grown up just “20-odd miles away from Galway”, he could never have imagined that his plays and his writing career could have endured for so long. He held audiences spell-bound since his first full-length work, ‘A Whistle in the Dark’, was performed in London in 1961. He became the self-appointed whistleblower on the secrets of the Irish psyche.