Tom Murphy’s Theatre of Everyday Space

By the time of his death in 2018, Tom Murphy was widely recognised as one of Ireland’s most important modern playwrights. Ireland’s experience of rapid modernisation, emigration, and globalisation is vividly captured in his plays, challenging generic notions of space, place, and the nation. In particular, his drama reconfigures Irish theatre’s uneasy relationship with globalisation, with the peasant kitchen, the pub, and the bog having traditionally been exported as the quintessential Irish spaces. Focusing on one of Murphy’s central innovations—his experimentation with theatre and everyday space—the book considers the significance of Murphy’s work in modern drama more broadly. The idea of “home” has preoccupied modern playwrights since the naturalist dramas of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, leading theatre scholars to focus on the everyday space of the home to the exclusion of other everyday spaces. Murphy’s works, by contrast, offer a new politics of the “alterior,” engaging with a diverse range of other spaces such as dancehalls, grocery shops, pubs, hotels, offices, churches, gasworks, and airports. His drama presents a “global sense of the local,” an emotional map of the shifting geographies of everyday life. By applying new theoretical perspectives and showcasing new archival materials inaccessible to previous scholars, the book revisits Murphy as an international playwright— a cartographer of our modern-day “global village.”