Jane returns to Druid in new Tom Murphy play

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

I’d always wanted Tom to write a part for me, but the Reverend Mother was not what I had in mind,” says actor Jane Brennan of her role in  a new play by Tom Murphy, Brigit, which will premiere in the Town Hall Theatre on September 14 in a double bill with its companion piece, Bailegangaire, which Druid first staged in 1985.

“She’s a funny character,” Jane says of Reverend Mother. “She is a strange mix of authority and arrogance and the assured superiority of many an old nun that we’ve all known and been terrified of.”

Jane needn’t have worried that her playwright husband had her in mind when writing the Reverend Mother – that’s not how Tom Murphy works. The voices in his plays come from his own head, she explains.

Those who have seen Bailegangaire will remember Mommo, a formidable and loquacious woman who presided over her home and the lives of her two granddaughters from the sanctity of her bed.

Forever starting and never finishing a story of how the town of Bochtán came to be known as Bailegangaire (the town without laughter), Mommo was played memorably by Siobhán McKenna in Druid’s original production.

While there were rumours at the time that Tom had written the role of Mommo with Siobhán McKenna in mind, those weren’t true.

“It became Siobhán’s, but it wasn’t hers,” says Jane of the part. “I get the feeling there is a lot of Tom’s mother in Mommo. He gets the use of language from her and the artistry from his father, who was a carpenter.”

Craft and carpentry are central to Brigit, which explores the lives of Mommo, her husband Séamus and their family when she was a younger woman.

In the play, the Reverend Mother commissions a statue of Brigit and bamboozles the local parish priest into financing it because she has a particular devotion to the saint. Séamus is its creator.

“The play is really about the creative process,” says Jane. “Séamus, the carpenter, becomes obsessed with the creation of the statue, only to have his wonderful creativity and imagination undermined by the Reverend Mother when it is finally finished.”

This has an impact on him, but it also unlocks something else in the relationship between himself and Mommo.

“It’s an autobiographical piece by Tom,” is Jane’s opinion, and she adds that the character of Séamus has parallels with the playwright’s carpenter father.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.