Gerard Murphy is looking back. As the Irish actor returns to the
Citizens Theatre in Glasgow for the first time in fourteen years to
appear in Samuel Beckett's solo play, Krapp's Last Tape, it's an all
too appropriate thing to be doing. Krapp, after all focuses on an old
man rewinding his past via reels of tapes on which he's charted his
hopes, ambitions and subsequent disappointments ever since he was a
young man. Not that Murphy had much in the way of failure during his
time at the Citz, which began an intense three years in 1974, and
continued intermittently until 1998, towards the end of what is now
regarded as the theatre's golden era under the three-way artistic
directorship of Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald and Philip
Prowse.
With Krapp forming part of a double bill with another Beckett
miniature, Footfalls, Murphy returns to the Citz at the end of incoming
director Dominic Hill's first season, which has tempted other prodigals
such as David Hayman and Cal MacAnninch back to the Gorbals. As he sits
alone in the foyer of a building he virtually lived in at the start of
his career, Murphy is understandably reflective.
“Coming back here, it feels like coming home,” he says, echoing both
Hayman and MacAnninch's sentiments. “It is home to me in so many ways.
It's where I started, and it's the most important theatre ever. Watchin
g King Lear, it was like Dominic had sprinkled magic dust. It was like
the best of the old times, but with new faces and young people
alongside the old, in that wonderful mixture that I associate with
here, and the tears came to my eyes.
“I just thought, how lucky am I to be back here. It's just a wonderful
feeling to sit in this bar and think, my God, in a time when in England
theatre is dying, theatre's very much alive here.”
Being alive is at the core of Krapp's Last Tape, which, by Murphy's own
nervous admission, “ is one helluva things to attempt, and it's
fantastic to be asked to try. I know it's just a man and a tape, but
it's such a mix of humour, pain, anguish, loneliness and poetry. This
man, he's profoundly alone. He's profoundly disillusioned. He's a randy
old bugger, but he can't get it up anymore, and we hear him thirty
years before, with all those hopes he had, of a great career and a
great novel, and this is a weird thing. Because here he is now, and he
still has constipation, he still hasn't written the great novel, and
he's still recording these tapes of where he is at any particular time.
He's a tough old nut, this one, and yet there are strands of undoubted
beauty in it that are sheer sentiment.”
The last person to perform as Krapp in the Citizens, of course, was one
of the men who first employed Murphy, Giles Havergal.
“Giles brought something very personal to it,” Murphy acknowledges,
“but I'm a different kind of man, so I hope I can bring something of my
own to it.”
Murphy grew up in Newry, County Down, in Northern Ireland, and was
originally meant to become a musician. Although naturally shy, “I could
see that if I went down that route I'd become more and more
introverted, and I wanted to find a voice.”
Thinking acting was “a night job” which he could fit around his
studies, he approached his local theatre, who explained to him it
wasn't quite like that. Even though Murphy didn't hold what was then a
compulsory Equity card, he got the job.
“What I didn't know was that they were looking for someone to play a
mentally defective child, and this angelic-looking creature with long
blonde hair, which I had then, walked through the door.”
When someone suggested he attended one of the Citz's open auditions,
Murphy arrived in Scotland equally naïve, but again, was offered a job.
The first show of what was originally a three-month contract was
Coriolanus, which, coming in the thick of the Citz's heyday as the
raciest show in town, was “a fantastically exciting shock.”
Over the next three years, Murphy played in Brecht, Shakespeare, Wilde
and de Sade. His Citizens swansong was supposed to be in Woyzeck, after
which the company contracts should have been up. A tragic motorway
accident involving a visiting company put paid to that, however, when a
new play by MacDonald, Chinchilla, was rushed into production to fill
the dark two weeks. An epic based around legendary impresario Diaghilev
in which Murphy played the title role, Chinchilla was an epic if
unlikely hit.
“It was just another play as far as I was concerned, and I had no idea
how it might affect things.”
As a direct result of Chinchilla, Trevor Nunn, then in charge of the
Royal Shakespeare Company, offered him the lead role in Juno and the
Paycock opposite Judy Dench. While this didn't stop Murphy returning to
the Citz to play Macbeth opposite David Hayman's Lady M as well as in a
revival of Chinchilla, Murphy has retained an ongoing relationship with
the RSC, where he is now an associate artist.
As well as bread-winning TV turns and cameos in big budget movies such
as Batman Returns, Murphy gas directed and translated French plays, but
remains modest about his output. It's the Citizens he really wants to
talk about, in terms of how his days there have informed his entire
career. Two things in particular stick out.
One night after a show, rather than go for a drink with the cast,
Murphy left intending to go straight home. Instead, he decided to pop
into a pub in the Gorbals he wasn't familiar with. On entering what
became instantly apparent was something of a spit and sawdust
rough-house, dressed as he was in some late 1970s punky attire, Murphy
instantly regretted his decision. When a couple of heavy types
sauntered over and asked him if he was an actor, he thought his number
was up. Such anxiety was heightened when they informed him the play he
was currently in wasn't up to much, or words to that effect. When they
suggested that the theatre should do more plays by Seneca, however, it
became clear that they were Citz regulars, and a lively evening
discussing the merits of Seneca,Wilde and others ensued.
If such an incident highlights just how much theatre can mean to its
audience, Murphy's second observation is equally as telling.
“It's the only theatre where show-time at 7.30 is the most important
time of the day. Half the people who work in some other theatres don't
even know what's on. Here it's different, where the cleaners and
everyone in the office know what's going on. I was shocked when I left
here to discover that other theatres weren't like that.”
Now he's back, however, Murphy can revel in such old loyalties. As for
Krapp, unlike the man he's playing, Murphy is looking forward to it.
“I'm a big Beckett fan,” he says, “but it scares the life out of me,
trying to get the accuracy of emotion. It's exactly like a piece of
music, in that it's a sonata for one man and a tape recorder, but it's
not good enough to just be technically accurate. You have to get the
emotion right as well.”
Krapp's Last Tape and Footfalls, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, May
30th-June 9th
www.citz.co.uk
The Herald, May 29th 2012
ends
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