ABSTRACT
In Bailegangaire, Irish playwright Tom Murphy orchestrates an encounter with the dead, for he suggests that it is in the hurting that a space for meaning to come into being can be located. Murphy is widely considered one of Ireland’s greatest living writers, his oeuvre as being of “great significance for the development of Irish theatre”, and Bailegangaire one of his masterpieces. Bailegangaire is a play that strives and rallies against silence. An encounter with silence is staged in the ruined voice, conferring the urgency to create meaning in our ephemeral lives by forging forms for our experience. Mommo’s seafóid establishes itself as a rich interplay of sounds that captures an emotional reality that makes of it something akin to music. Music is the ideal that Mommo’s ruined voice strives towards: it is able to maintain the tensions between sound and silence, presence and absence, between the varied emotions that each character struggles to express.
