Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, premiered by Druid Theatre, Galway, in 1985 has its origins in a three-part TV drama which Murphy started planning in 1981. Of the three scripts only one, Brigit, was screened by RTÉ in 1988, The Contest became A Thief of a Christmas which was staged by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1988, and Mommo, the last of the projected trilogy, became Bailegangaire. In 2014, nearly 30 years after its premiere, Druid staged Bailegangaire in tandem with Brigit which Murphy had reworked for the theatre, a pairing which, in bringing the fraught relationship of Mommo and her husband, Seamus, to the fore, helped clarify the grounds of the trauma informing her endless, but never completed narrative. This essay uses Murphy's notebooks and drafts, along with a comparison of Brigit in both its TV and theatre forms, to show how Murphy progressively refined Bailegangaire into a drama whose causal chain stretches back to psychological states forged under the stresses of the Irish Famine.
