by 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 the age of 80: “Socially and in terms of religion, something big is being dismantled and that is very exciting.”
His career was characterized by the personal and professional courage that this type of drama required. Refusing to be conditioned by the expectations of his audience, Kilroy encouraged them to think outside the boxes of religion, social convention and sexuality, and expressed their unspoken fears and anxieties.
Each play challenged an aspect of Irish society and suggested an “other” way of seeing it. His first play on stage was The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1968), the first in Ireland to address homophobia. Talbot’s Box (1977, which went to the Royal Court theater in London) explored the nature of religious fervor. Madame MacAdam’s Traveling Theater (1991, which went to the Irish Repertory theater in New York) set the universal darkness of the second world war against the concerns of small towns in the Irish countryside. A pair of plays on Oscar Wilde, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) and My Scandalous Life (2004), opened up the unspoken privacy of lives lived in public with great pomp.
Although the Abbey Theatre, Dublin – the national theater of Ireland – premiered many of his works – he felt that early in his life the London management was against Irish plays, and the reviewers suggested that they “did not aim serious attention”. However, in 1981 the Royal Court commissioned an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which premiered in London, with a strong performance by Alan Rickman, and was then only accepted by the Irish Theater Company in Tralee. In 2021 Druid Theater Company staged a production of it in Cool Park, Galway.
Kilroy was interested in the “gaps” in history, where a dramatist could exercise his imagination, “inventing a reality that might represent ordinary life but is still different 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 the lack of mind threatens to swallow us all”. Double Cross combined the figures of Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s minister of information in the second world war, and William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi broadcaster) – two Irishmen who are linked together in symbiosis by a playwright who was interested in the idea of duality them, and the ironic ambiguities of Irish identity. They never met in real life but, through a real single actor playing both parts – Rea in the premiere – they faced each other’s feelings of loyalty and betrayal.
Kilroy also won with his first novel, The Big Chapel (1971), set in his native County Kilkenny, with religion and violence at its core. It won the Guardian fiction prize and the Heinemann prize for literature, and was shortlisted for the Booker prize. He wrote an unpublished sequel, and left behind at least one other unfinished novel.
Kilroy was born in Killeen, between Kilkenny and Clonmel, one of 10 children of May (née Devine) and Thomas Kilroy, a police sergeant. Both parents were active in the Irish war of independence, and Kilroy was very aware of belonging to the last generation that would hear stories about the rise of Ireland in the form of memories rather than history. He recalled his parents in Over the Backyard Wall (2018), an autobiography that went up to the 1960s.
From St Kieran’s College, Kilkenny, he went to University College, Dublin, where he graduated with a degree in English. After working as a teacher and headmaster, he returned to UCD in 1965 as a senior lecturer covering the areas of English, Anglo-Irish drama and the 18th century. He became professor of English at University College, Galway (1978-89), and also held visiting positions at Notre Dame, Vanderbilt and McGill universities in North America. At the age of 55, he made the transition to full-time drama.
I would love to see two mice cross a stage, provided they are well lit and well understood
He received a Catholic education, and resisted the demands of authority, spiritual or political; in his play this was, as one critic put it, “radically conceptual”. In Mr Roche, as he said, “he had the courage to take off the soutane” – the cassock. His individuality shows in the portraits of the artists Brian Bourke and John Behan: a forbidding exterior, almost strange, camouflaging the private man who was drily funny but shy to the point of idleness.
He was, in the words of his friend the poet Gerald Dawe, “without the name of ego” and “secular passion”. Kilroy himself said in his essay The Irish Writer: Self and Society , 1950-80 that he was “deeply concerned about what happens when the intense hopes, fears, beliefs of the private person are subjected to the splitting, diffuse effects of public life . “.
Although he embraced new stage techniques, Kilroy never strayed from theatrical conventions. When challenged that his work was not experimental, he replied: “I would love to see two mice crossing a stage, provided they were well lit and well understood.”
In 1963 he married Patricia Cobie, with whom he had three sons, Hugh, Lorcan and Desaún. They divorced in 1980, and seven years later he married Julia Carlson, with whom he had a daughter, Hannah May. Julia and her children survive.
• Thomas Francis Kilroy, playwright born 23 September 1934; he died 7 December 2023
