The Work of a ‘Young Nationalist’?: Tom Murphy's The Patriot Game and the Commemoration of Easter 1916

Abstract

In 1965 Tom Murphy was commissioned by BBC Television to write a play, The Patriot Game, to be broadcast in the following year on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. However, it was finally not made as the estimated cost of the production exceeded the allocated budget. The play remained unseen, until twenty-five years later Murphy revised the work for a stage production on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Rising in 1991. This essay analyzes the two versions of The Patriot Game within the context of very different moments of commemoration; the first at a time of national redefinition when the Irish state used the event as part of its modernization agenda, and the second when the Troubles in Northern Ireland problematized any public commemoration of armed struggle in the pursuit of political aims. It examines how Murphy's 1991 version of his play went against the tendency of contemporary writers whose attitude to the Rising was one of rejection or derision and, in particular, compares the production of The Patriot Game with the Garry Hynes's production of The Plough and the Stars which was on the Abbey's main stage while Murphy's play occupied the smaller space of the Peacock.