Birthday bash at Abbey
THE Abbey Theatre is a big place for a young playwright to premiere their second full-length play, and bigger still when you are also the first writer in 15 years to do so. Yet Dublin writer Elaine Murphy — author of sensational hit, Little Gem — is taking it all in her stride.
“I remember getting the phonecall from artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail telling me that we were going to the main stage,” says Murphy.
“I had to sit down. I was like, ‘Oh really? Oh God. Okay.’ And I suppose there would be that safety net if it were to start on the Peacock [the Abbey’s second stage]. You could see how it did, and if it grew then maybe it could move up later. But then I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s do it. Let’s get it out there’.”
The play’s director, Jim Culleton, says the Abbey deserves great credit for showing faith in new Irish theatre.
“New plays are always a risk,” he says. “Nobody’s seen them before. That’s what is exciting about them but it’s what makes them risky as well. Thankfully, the Abbey is putting its money where its mouth is and saying we believe in new plays. So, fingers crossed, people will respond in kind.”
Culleton is a seasoned ‘midwife’ when it comes to bringing new Irish plays into the world. His own company, Fishamble, has staked its reputation on a commitment to new Irish theatre and it has found huge success doing so. Culleton is therefore delighted to be working on Shush, having been charmed by Murphy’s debut.
“I remember seeing Little Gem and thinking ‘Gosh, this is such an original, fresh voice, full of authenticity and integrity’,” he says. “It was very funny, very real, and very honest, and I think Shush has all the same honesty.”
The new play centres on the emotional birthday party of one of its five women characters.
“Four women force a fifth — a reluctant birthday girl — to have her party and it’s about what these women talk about over the course of an evening,” says Culleton.
“It’s a play about coping with life and how female friendships get you through. But the friendships are fraught and problematic, too, as much as they are supportive.”
Murphy’s debut, Little Gem — in which three generations of women confessed their secret desires — won the Artane girl numerous awards, and the play was celebrated for its affecting and candid depiction of women’s personal lives, sex toys et al. Shush, too, offers a window into the interior lives of Irish women.
“As a man, directing the play, it’s like suddenly being a guest to a gathering of women and a world you don’t normally get access to,” says Culleton.
“It’s been an eye-opener. It’s amazing the amount of times lads have said to me, ‘I will never forgive you for the conversation I had with my mother-in-law, or whoever, on the way home from Little Gem’,” says Murphy.
“The thing about women is that they would talk about all this stuff on a night out and men are quite shocked by that. But then men are surprised, too, that we don’t share everything. They think we say too much but, probably, we don’t say enough either. That’s the funny thing about female friendships. They can be wonderful and really good, but also they can be quite vicious.”
Sometimes, women don’t actually talk about the stuff they should be talking about, she says.
“The women in Shush all know that there’s something really wrong with their friend. They’ve been watching her for a long time before they all arrive at her doorstep this one night. But they still haven’t come out and said it to her. They haven’t said, ‘we know that something’s up with you’. So the play deals with that.”
If Shush deals with the things in women’s lives that are talked about and the things that aren’t, it also offers a broader snapshot of life in contemporary Dublin, a city where — due to the housing boom years — traditional class boundaries have greatly fluctuated.
“I think Shush, quite like Elaine herself, is very unassuming about making any big sweeping statements about Ireland,” says Culleton.
“Yet, under the surface, the play captures a whole range of characters and issues. There are old notions of class in Dublin and that’s all shifted and changed a lot in recent years. Where people live is no longer a sign, as much as it once was, of them fitting into a certain class, and Shush captures that very well.”
As a playwright, Murphy feels one of her core objectives is to put everyday characters up on stage and depict the quiet drama in their lives.
“With Little Gem, people were saying to me, ‘that’s my sister’ or ‘that’s my aunt’,” she says.
“And you wonder why these kinds of characters aren’t on stage more. At the same time, when you’re putting so-called ‘normal people’ up there, you have to be careful that they’re not boring.”
It has paid off. Five years after its debut, Little Gem continues to travel the world, spawning translations in Afrikaner and even Hebrew. “It’s funny,” says Murphy. “I get the stills from some of them and what’s weird is that the grannies always look the same.”
It would appear that Murphy’s gift for finding the universal in the local is also at work in Shush.
“Someone said to me that anyone who’s ever had a mother is going to love this play. So there you go. If that’s true, then it’s off to a good start,” says Culleton:
*Shush runs Jun 6 – Jul 20
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