Theatre review: Brigit/Bailegangaire
Although each play stands by itself, there is much to relish in watching Tom Murphy’s two plays together. Bailegangaire is one of the Tuam dramatist’s great masterpieces, a piece of scintillating lyricism in which an elderly woman, her mind astray, spins out a dark yarn steeped in folklore and tragedy. Brigit is a new play, a ‘prequel’ to Bailegangaire, in which we witness an episode in the lives of the same protagonists many years before. It centres on Seamus (Bosco Hogan), a village handyman asked to sculpt a new statue of St Brigid for the local convent. Both plays are directed by Druid’s Garry Hynes.
Instructively, the first dramatic action in Brigit is the sudden, magical flaring up of the hearth onstage. This most elemental of metaphors, fire, is key to both plays — at once the tragic weight of Mommo’s confession in Bailegangaire and yet a symbol of creative redemption in Brigit. In the latter, we movingly witness the sparks flying off Seamus’s chisel as he sharpens it on a grinding wheel.
