Published in the Sunday Tribune, July 6, 2008

In the Gents before opening night of ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’, two gentlemen were recalling the original production of the play, from 1975. This is a particular habit of Tom Murphy’s audiences, and it is difficult to leave a Tom Murphy play without overhearing at least one conversation about the original production of ‘The Gigli Concert’. This can be a little alienating. In 1975, I was one.

‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ was hugely controversial then. There were disturbances at the Abbey, angry sermons across the country, and Tom Murphy didn’t write for two years afterwards. It was also a great success. Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh called it one of the great Irish dramas, alongside ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ and ‘Juno and the Paycock’. (He was right.)

Despite this apparent impact, ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ seems to have been entirely absent from the culture into which I was inducted as I grew up. It is not that we were not aware of voices of protest against, and within, the church, growing up as Catholics through the 1970s and 1980s, but that Murphy’s voice in this play seems so mature as to have bypassed protest. ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ seems written from a very different culture to 1970s Ireland – a post-religious one, in which the church survives as a sanctuary from a hostile, secular society, rather than as the core of a Christian one.

So if Murphy was seen, then, as an angry young man, ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ is, in fact, surprisingly gentle. Murphy rails against the institutional church but celebrates the spiritual one. And the play itself if a homage to the architectural church – to the physical and artistic legacy of Christianity.

Three weary travellers seek sanctuary overnight in a church. They are alien to its creed, and have little or no respect for its rituals and liturgy. Their actions are superficially profane – violence, swearing, sexual innuendo, drunkenness. But their accounts of themselves are confessional, and their purpose there is true to the essence of the church of the crucifixion: the confronting of despair.

There is a tragic aspect to the play, with untimely death threaded through its narrative. But it is not a tragedy. It is a story of relentless struggle, and yet of survival.

Tom Murphy’s direction brings a sense of liturgy, rather than revolt, to the piece, and a respect for the dark heights and recesses of the church, beautifully designed by Monica Frawley and lit by John Comiskey. It is a beautiful piece of writing, give fine voice by Robert O’Mahoney, Declan Conlon, Bosco Hogan and, especially, Caoilfhionn Dunne. More than 30 years on, this is a shining piece of theatre.

At the Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin