Rachel Sarah Murphy: Ex-Fair City actress on returning to the stage in Cork
Cork actress Rachel Sarah Murphy played Jo Fahey in Fair City for many years.
It has been 25 years since actor and businesswoman, Rachel Sarah Murphy, has been on the stage. The former Fair City actor, who played Jo Fahey in the TV soap for 16 years, is making her stage comeback in Same Time Next Year at the Cork Arts Theatre. This 1975 romantic comedy by Bernard Slade is about two people, married to others, who meet for a romantic tryst once a year for over twenty-five years.
Murphy’s last theatrical role was that of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. That too was at the Cork Arts Theatre. “After that, I pretty much went into Fair City,” says Murphy who left the fictional Carrigstown in 2016 and moved her Irish Film Academy from Dublin to Cork.
The teaching business didn’t work out in her native city but undeterred, Murphy set up two more companies, an auctioneering enterprise (following in her mother’s and sister’s footsteps) and a cleaning company focusing on getting lettings ready for habitation.
Just over a year ago, on New Year’s Day, Murphy declared on social media that she was going to get back into acting. “Within five minutes of posting that, Michael Murphy texted me. He had been asking me to do this show for a while,” she says.
He is playing opposite Murphy’s character, Doris, in a play directed by Mary Curtin. It took them a year to get a relatively lengthy slot at the Cork Arts Theatre.
Murphy, a single mother to 13-year-old Lolly, says acting isn’t something that anyone with a clear head would choose as a career. “It’s like your sexuality; it’s there and there’s nothing you can do to stop it,” says the actress from Montenotte who attended school at Scoil Mhuire.
A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, Murphy (who will be fifty-two this year) seems very practical with her forays into the world of commerce. “I hope I never get too practical because I think that ruins spontaneity. But when it comes to Lolly, obviously I’m very practical. I’m very much a realist. I’m not overly practical in life because you have only one shot so why not make it what you want to make it. I am going to set up acting classes again because I love teaching and I think good acting is needed.”
Murphy has a degree in the Meisner Technique. Its goal is for the actor to not focus on themselSves but instead concentrate on the other actors in the immediate environment. “It’s playing off the other person. That’s the technique I used to teach and will teach again. It’s a wonderful way of acting because it’s truthful and honest and it’s not predictable. You can’t predetermine how you’re going to say a line.”
To reassure herself about her acting abilities, Murphy was guided by acting coach Tom Kibbe, who got her to revisit Blanche DuBois as well as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Murphy says her ‘instrument’ is working well. It’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised.
Has Murphy changed much from the teenager that joined The Loft in Cork which specialised in Shakespearean acting? “Obviously, having a baby changes you hugely. It’s no longer all about you. But I think the core of me hasn’t changed. I’m still extremely positive. I have lots of energy although the menopause did change me but I’m coming out of that.”
Murphy’s character in Same Time Next Year, is somebody every woman will empathise with, she says. “She got pregnant at 18, out of wedlock, and later had more children. She never graduated from high school so she doesn’t have much education. She doesn’t get on with her mother-in-law. The change in her from a sweet girl to a woman who comes into her own is palpable. You have to ask why she comes back to George once a year, every year?”
One thing that Murphy appreciates about getting older is that she is not willing to take on “crap roles. When you’re young, you say ‘yes’ to everything. I think what I’ll probably do is one theatre show a year, something that I love and will learn from.”
Lolly accompanies her mother to rehearsals but has no interest in becoming a thespian. “She’s a sailor. It’s important for her to see what her mother does. She has seen me working for money but she has never seen me working for love. I’m working for love now, with this play. That’s a choice I’m making. I’m set up whereby I can work for love.”
- Same Time Next Year is at Cork Arts Theatre from February 19 – March 1.
- See corkartstheatre.com
