The plays of Thomas Kilroy, who has died aged 89, gave Ireland a moving picture of its development from the 1950s to the present day. As he said at age 80: “Something big, socially and religiously, is falling apart, and it’s very exciting.”
His career was characterized by the personal and professional courage that such drama required. Refusing to be conditioned by his audience’s expectations, Kilroy encouraged them to think outside of religion, social conventions, and sexual mores and addressed unspoken fears and anxieties.
Each play challenged an aspect of Irish society and suggested an “other” perspective. His first staged play was The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1968), the first play to address homophobia in Ireland. Talbot’s Box (1977, went to the Royal Court Theatre, London) examined the nature of religious fervor. Madame MacAdam Traveling Theater (1991, went to the Irish Repertory theater in New York) pitted the universal blackness of the second world war against the small-town anxieties of rural Ireland. A pair of plays on Oscar Wilde, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) and My Scandalous Life (2004), brought to light the unspoken intimacies of lives lived magnificently in public.
Although many of his works were premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre, early in his career he felt the London management was resistant to his Irish plays, with critics giving the impression that they “did not warrant serious attention”. However, in 1981 the Royal Court commissioned his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull; this adaptation premiered in London, with a powerful performance by Alan Rickman, and was only later picked up by the Irish Theater Company in Tralee. In 2021 Druid Theater Company staged a production at Coole Park in Galway.
Kilroy was fascinated by the “gaps” in history where a playwright could use his imagination “to invent a reality that might reflect everyday life but was still distinct from it.” This led him to his masterpiece, Double Cross (1986), written for Field Day, the theater company founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. He was attracted to their work because it “provided a platform for the life of the mind at a time when mindlessness threatens to engulf us all”. Double Cross juxtaposed the figures of Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s second world war minister of information, and William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi publisher); two Irishmen were linked in symbiosis by a playwright fascinated by the idea of duality. and the ironic ambiguities of Irish identity. They never met in life, but through the single actor figure who plays both roles – Rea in the premiere – they confront each other’s sense of both loyalty and betrayal.
Kilroy also scored a triumph with his first novel, The Big Chapel (1971), set in his hometown of County Kilkenny and centered around religion and violence. It won the Guardian fiction prize and the Heinemann literary prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker prize. He wrote an unpublished sequel and left behind at least one more unfinished novel.
Kilroy was born in Callan, between Kilkenny and Clonmel, one of 10 children of May (née Devine) and police sergeant Thomas Kilroy. Both parents were active in Ireland’s war of independence, and Kilroy was conscious of belonging to the last generation to hear the stories of Ireland’s emergence in the form of memories rather than history. He remembered his parents in Over the Backyard Wall (2018), an autobiography dating back to the 1960s.
From St Kieran’s college in Kilkenny he went to University College Dublin where he took a degree in English. After working as a teacher and headteacher, he returned to UCD in 1965 as a senior lecturer in English, Anglo-Irish and 18th-century drama. He became professor of English at University College Galway (1978-89), while also holding visiting posts at Notre Dame, Vanderbilt and McGill universities in North America. At the age of 55, he transitioned into full-time playwriting.
I would happily watch two mice pass across the stage, provided they were well lit and displayed a sense of purpose.
Being Catholic-educated, he resisted claims to authority, whether spiritual or political; In his drama, this became “radically conceptual,” as one critic noted. Mr. Roche, in his own words, “found the courage to come out from under the robe.” His individuality is evident in portraits by artists Brian Bourke and John Behan: a forbidding, almost gruff exterior that camouflages the private man who is tough, witty but shy to the point of shyness.
In the words of his friend, the poet Gerald Dawe, he was “not in love with ego” and “passionately secular.” In his essay The Irish Writer: Self and Society, 1950-80, Kilroy said he was “horrified by what happens when the intense, concentrated hopes, fears, and beliefs of the private person are exposed to the shattering, dispersing effects of public life.” ”.
Although he adopted new stage techniques, Kilroy never strayed from theater traditions. When asked if his work was non-experimental, he replied: “I would happily watch two mice pass across the stage, provided they were well lit and displayed a sense of purpose.”
He married Patricia Cobie in 1963 and had three sons with her, Hugh, Lorcan and Desmond. They divorced in 1980, and seven years later he married Julia Carlson, with whom he had a daughter named Hannah May. He is survived by Julia and their children.
• Thomas Francis Kilroy, playwright, born September 23, 1934; Died December 7, 2023