The Last Days Of A Reluctant Tyrant
REVIEWS: WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
“Property, land, money. That’s all she ever thought of.” The dying words of a disaffected son provide a useful synopsis of Tom Murphy’s new play. While its source is a 19th-century Russian novel – The Golovlyov Family, by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin – its contemporary Irish resonances are amplified to highlight greed and the hollowness of religious hypocrisy. The setting of Conall Morrison’s ambitious production is poised unspecifically between Russia and Ireland, but as a morality tale, this is thumping with home truths.
Murphy’s themes have cosmic relevance, his pen drawing them expertly into the strictures and forms of domestic tragedy. And in his new play he examines the blinding destruction of the human spirit when peace of mind is seen as a product to be bought with power, in this case the power of land.
The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant is Tom Murphy’s 17th work to premiere at Ireland’s national theatre.
Lauded as he is as one of the country’s greatest living playwrights and – according to Colm Toibin – ‘‘the nearest thing we have to genius’’, the premiere of any work by Murphy generates much anticipation in the world of Irish theatre.
Perhaps, in decades to come, it will be possible to separate Tom Murphy’s new play from the dominant news story of the week that preceded its premiere. Or perhaps the play will come to be seen as the first, great attempt to wrestle with the demons that produced the Irish children’s institutions.
The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant – Abbey Theatre, Dublin: Why do great Irish writers resonate with great Russian writers? Brian Friel once expressed empathy with characters who “have no expectations whatever from love, but still invest everything in it”. But to judge from the Abbey’s new theatrical version of Shchedrin’s bleakly satirical 19th-century novel, The Golovlyov Family , Tom Murphy’s sympathies lie elsewhere.
As a picture of a disintegrating Russian family, and of a world in which security is more important than succour, Tom Murphy’s new play reflects, with uncanny prescience, the current mood of the country, writes SARA KEATING