The life and work of Seamus Murphy is celebrated in a new play, but you'll have to look elsewhere for nostalgia, writes Mary Leland.
Seamus Murphy, RHA, was a dedicated and sophisticated artist. He made his name as a sculptor, and his autobiography, Stone Mad, is a vivid and affectionate account of life as a chiseller. Now, Johnny Hanrahan has adapted the book for a new theatrical production, which opens at the Everyman Palace on April 11th.
Although Hanrahan doesn't say so, his emphasis is a kind of counter-attack on the surge of nostalgia and reminiscence awakened in the city by news of several events scheduled between now and September, to commemorate Murphy's life and work. This celebration of the centenary of his birth could easily fall into an anecdotal resonance, for Murphy could seem to shed the artist for the sake of a good story well told; he had myriads of stories about them, rich with humour, humanity and folkloric indignation. Most memorably, he altered the way one looked at things; his was an absorbent imagination and to meet him in the city streets was to feel enlightened, warmed by what was sometimes an acerbic generosity of vision and appreciation.
But there has been enough of that. Peter Murray is curator of the Crawford Gallery, which is mounting an exhibition of Murphy's work. He says it's time to talk about "a different person - canny, dedicated, professional and very aware of what was happening around him. We will not offer a whisper of that anecdotal persona; it's quite another picture when you get a look at the work."
Looking at the work is what playwright Johnny Hanrahan has been doing. Like so many others of his generation, he read Stone Madas a young man for no reason that he can remember; it was just lying around at home. This commission, which was generated by the centenary committee organised by Cork City Council, sent him back to the book, but also back to all he could find of Murphy in museums and cemeteries and churches, to television documentaries, interviews and assessments and, realising how ignorant he was about stone itself, to sculptor and stone-carver Ken Thompson.
"Talking to Ken both about the work and about the book emphasised the sensibility with which Stone Madwas written," says Hanrahan. "I'm quite touched by those values, by those working guys who were so humble about themselves, and by the almost medieval communion between them, that sense of the guilds binding the process from apprentice to master craftsman. I had intended to be completely craftsmanlike myself in my approach to achieving a dramatic structure for the book, but I realised that this is sensitive material that you want to honour in some way - it's quite tricky stuff."
First published in 1950, the book is an account of Murphy's early days working in a stoneyard in Blackpool in Cork. Its characters are the "stonies", the men of the dust, the cutters and polishers of stone, the carvers of altar-rails, memorials, name-plates, pulpits and headstones, an almost vanished (or banished) tribe of once-honoured craftsmen. They were not sculptors, but it was for the unifying of the craft and the art that Murphy was to become renowned.
The son of a train-driver and removed from school at the age of 14 because, he said himself, his father didn't want him educated by the clergy, his desire to be a sculptor was met by the compromise of an apprenticeship at O'Connell's stoneworks in Blackpool. While at St Patrick's national school in the city, however, he was taught by Daniel Corkery, later a professor of English at University College Cork (UCC) and author of The Hidden Ireland. An amateur painter himself, Corkery recognised the young Seamus as a lad of talent and encouraged him to attend night classes at the Cork School of Art. There, he won the Gibson Bequest scholarship in 1932 and went to study in Paris, where he was introduced to the foremost practitioners in European art.
ACCORDING TO THE ARThistorian Ann Wilson, his pilgrimages to Chartres were among the influences that altered and sharpened his sculptural style, while reinforcing his attitude to technique and process. Absorbing a wealth of ideas, including his concept of the sculptor's role in society, he saw in the medieval sculpture of France a valid model of practice. "Murphy was entranced by a vision of the medieval craftsman, whose work was needed and meaningful, and of a model of production which valued skill and material as well as concept and creativity," Wilson says.
Was Cork the place in which to put those ideas into practice? Of course there were busts and statues and ceremonial inscriptions and installations both in Ireland and abroad, from Áras an Uachtaráin to the Church of St Brigid in Chicago, from UCC to Leinster House and St Stephen's Green, from a dog's drinking-bowl to an entire church, while private commissions remain with their owners or stand against the weather in churchyards all over the country. Also, as Louis Marcus wrote in a catalogue essay, Murphy was eventually to receive "the honorary distinctions that this country reserves for artists whom it has only grudgingly employed". But in that same catalogue his widow Maighread (daughter of the sculptor Joseph Higgins) recalled that he produced a large number of portrait busts in the last decade of his life "when there was little call for carved figures, and his work in stone was largely confined to lettered tablets". Among his most delicate and sensitive portraits are those which were not commissioned, "but done to keep himself occupied when he had no work".
All the same, as John Biggs pointed out (again in the same catalogue), those lettered tablets and headstones required the whole man: "A Murphy gravestone, as much as a Murphy bust or statue, is a work of Murphy the artist whole and complete."
Maybe it isn't obvious in the text but it's possible to read Stone Madnot only as a tribute from an apprentice to the masters and journeymen of his craft, but as a mark of his gratitude to those men who, knowing that the youngster would be unpaid because his parents could not afford the apprenticeship fee of £80, clubbed together at threepence a head to give him a weekly wage.
This is the kind of thing that is making life difficult for Johnny Hanrahan: he has had to be ruthless in the choices he had to make with what he calls "very seductive material", but he is also conscious that the book tells Murphy's own story. "He tells it obliquely but in what he says about the other men there is an entire artistic credo, a statement of personal values from an extremely incisive and contemporary writer," Hanrahan says.
While the fluid narrative style of the book is reminiscent of Murphy's friendship with Timothy Buckley of Gougane Barra, that great storyteller immortalised in The Tailor and Ansty, it is the contemporary context that director Pat Kiernan relishes about this project, at a time when he sees buildings "flying up" around Cork without any consideration or thought. But that very thoughtfulness in the book, which Kiernan too read "years ago", is a problem for the stage.
"It's a memoir, it's reflective, and we have to hold onto the voice of the narrator, which itself is both the 14-year-old voice and the 64-year-old voice and with the same actor, Eamonn Hunt, playing both of them," Kiernan says.
In fact, the cast itself is part of the collaborative experience for both Hanrahan and Kiernan. "Pat," says Hanrahan, "is a great believer in the insights of the actors; they can be acute judges of what's working and he trusts that, and that's the way I like to write too, it's essential to be able to work with the creativity of other people."
All the same, while it was Kiernan's idea to get an adaptation that would replace the late Eamonn Kelly's one-man version of the book, Hanrahan isn't looking to make something sensationally new out of the material. "The task is to make the text work on the stage, and we're hoping to make it quite an urgent experience. The idiom may be old-fashioned now, and we are very aware of the danger of a nostalgia-fest, which would be a great disservice to someone who for me is an almost mythical person," says Hanrahan. "But I'm not so interested now in the genial man because it's clear that the writing of this book was a considered action on his part; it's the work of a mature thinker committing himself to a serious enterprise."
When Seamus Murphy died suddenly in 1975 he had bequeathed his tools and workbench to Ken Thompson, with a note of admiration that was much to the younger sculptor's surprise and gratification. "It was like inheriting a practice," remembers Thompson, who also completed Murphy's unfinished commissions, "but we didn't know one another well, and at the time, of course, I was much more in love with people like Henry Moore or Eric Gill, although I would show Seamus things I had done. Now I realise how difficult it must have been for him, more or less a voice crying in the wilderness when people were beginning to prefer fibreglass and plastic and rubber.
"But his work is there, he was a very good sculptor and people will be affected by it if they want to be affected. And the book is timeless, a huge legacy. Really, when I think of it, he had a great life; he was ploughing a lonely furrow, as I am now, but it's a furrow he loved, just as I do. He was a wonderful man who did wonderful work, and really, what more does one want?"
Stone Mad runs at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork Apr 11-21. Booking: 021-4501673.
