Thomas Kilroy

Thomas Kilroy was a leading figure in a generation of writers who brought an often controversial modernity to Irish theatre. His work often mirrored the country’s social and economic transformation as it moved from Europe’s geographical edge to the centre of the continent’s political life. Among the many tributes paid to him on his death, Irish president Michael D Higgins hailed him for being “unafraid to cross boundaries, while examining social issues that would not have been widely considered for audiences in Irish theatre previously”.

Kilroy’s disenchantment with his native theatre had been prompted by visits to Stratford and London in his mid-20s, the experience revealing to him how parochial and moribund Irish theatre in the middle of the last century had become.

He began agitating for a more radical and modern approach in a series of increasingly provocative articles. His Groundwork for an Irish Theatre in 1959 offered a manifesto he would later come to realise in his own plays.

Born in Callan, County Kilkenny, one of 10 children, Kilroy excelled in sports at school, where he captained the senior hurling team, before studying English Literature at University College Dublin. His master’s degree focused on the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe.

On graduating he took up a teaching post before rejoining his alma mater in 1965 as a senior lecturer in English, Anglo-Irish and 18th-century drama.

His first play, Say Hello to Johnny, won a BBC Northern Ireland radio drama prize and was broadcast, with a cast including Cyril Cusack, Harold Goldblatt and JJ Murphy, in 1968. The same year, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, one of the first Irish plays to feature a homosexual character, was seen in the Dublin Theatre Festival. It raised eyebrows and ripples there, and in Richard Eyre’s staging at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in 1969.

Kilroy’s long association with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre began with The O’Neill in the venue’s Peacock studio space in 1969. Of his 16 stage works, eight were premiered by the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre.

The five-decades-long relationship that followed also saw Kilroy variously serving as the Abbey’s script editor (1977-78), writer in association (1998), and on its governing board (2010-16).

He spent the early 1970s travelling, including lecturing visits to American universities, returning home to launch and steer Ireland’s first, highly influential, national writers’ workshop in Galway in 1976. Two years later, he was appointed professor of English at the city’s university, holding the position for 11 years.

He made his presence equally felt north of Ireland’s conflicted border at the Field Day Theatre Company, founded in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea, on whose board he also served.

In 1986, he wrote Double Cross for the Derry-based company. It paralleled the lives of Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s minister of information during the Second World War, and Nazi propaganda broadcaster William ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ Joyce and was seen at London’s Royal Court. Kilroy’s revised version of the play was revived by the Abbey and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2018.

Kilroy also involved himself with canonical works of European theatre, strikingly transposing Chekhov’s The Seagull (1981), Ibsen’s Ghosts (1989), Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1996) and Christ Deliver Us! (2010) – inspired by Wedekind’s Spring Awakening – to Irish settings.

In The Seagull, commissioned by Max Stafford-Clark, set in late-19th-century Galway and first seen at London’s Royal Court, The Stage noted “the drama of human anguish flourishes in all its dark and stark glory”.

It was given a gala reading at London’s St James Theatre with Ian McKellen and Trudie Styler in 2014, and revived by Druid Theatre on tour in 2021.

Garry Hynes, Druid’s artistic director, remembered him as “a great and long-time friend [and] a true man of the theatre”.

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