Tom Kilroy - Before the Critics

Playwright Tom Kilroy tells up about Christ Deliver Us!, a play inspired by a 19th-century German tragedy that tackles abortion, rape and suicide, and which gets its world premiere at the Abbey this month.

What did you take from Frank Wedekind's 'Spring Awakening'?

It started out as a straight adaptation, but as I went on it moved further and further away from the original and eventually become an Irish play rather than a German play. The central story is about teenagers in a very repressed society, and I reset in Ireland in the 1950s, my own schooldays.

When did you write it?

I finished writing it during these rehearsals. I was still writing when we were rehearsing. it was originally written six or seven years ago but I went back to it again. I think I improved it.

How are rehearsals going?

They're going very well. I like to leave the actors alone and stay away from the rehearsal room while they are trying to work it out creatively themselves. I think it gives them freedom. It's a chance for me to work with young people, We have a brilliant young director, Wayne Jordan and some wonderfully talented young actors, boys and girls. That's been a great pleasure for me.

Tell us about the main characters.

Mossie and Michael are buddies, Michael gets involved with Winnie and they have a relationship, so it's a love story as well as everything else. Although it's a tragic love story. Mossie is one of these characters who's very vunerable, sensitive and troubled with a very unhappy family background. So the story is essentially the three of them.


The play has been tagged as highlighting the hypocrisy of a society under the thumb of the Church...

It's a play that was written before the Murphy report, but I see it as a play behind the clerical scandals. It's not about sex abuse, it's a play that deals more with physical abuse. There was a great deal of physical abuse in schools when I was growing up, so it has that. It's about the hypocrisy of church and state in dealing with young people.

And you've written a play about William Blake?
Yes, I've written it, but it hasn't been produced. It's a difficult play to do, again it's a large scale play. It's about his relationship to his wife, she was a remarkable life. She was an illiterate person but she understood this strange man that she was married to. It's about their relationship more than anything else.

'Spring Awakening' was made into a musical, any plans yourself?

Ha ha! Musicals? Well I don't know about that. Spring Awakening was a rock musical, I didn't see the musical version but I know about it, and it's very successful apparently.

Christ Deliver Us runs at the Abbey Theatre, Abbey Street, Dublin 1 from February 16 - 13 March.€38/€28, abbeytheatre.ie