Limelight catches up with Luke Murphy in the middle of rehearsals. As well as reacquainting his brain and body with Volcano, an epic work he created but hasn’t performed in seven months, he is also introducing a new performer to its intricacies ahead of its Australian premiere.

Luke Murphy in Volcano. Photo © Emijlia Jefrehmova

“I’m really enjoying the process,” Murphy says. “It lets me shine a light on all those decisions I made years ago, things I did out of habit or choices that came out of some necessity at the time.”

“Sometimes, I realise, I don’t have answers when someone says, ‘Why do you do that?’, because I’m no longer that person who was doing it the first time around.”

Murphy has just three weeks to revive the immersive, four-hour dance-theatre work before flying to Brisbane and catching up with its set, which was shipped to Australia weeks ago by sea. “I’m just praying it doesn’t get hit by a rogue wave or something.”

First performed at Galway International Arts Festival in 2021 and subsequently in New York earlier this year, Volcano takes the form of a live performance that melds elements of experimental theatre, durational performance, and contemporary dance with the binge-worthiness of a dystopian sci-fi TV series.

Unfolding in four 45-minute episodes, it presents its audience with the elaborately designed spectacle of a decrepit living room – a room with no door – and two men determined to relive the ‘greatest hits’ of their memories: a night at a rave, a favourite game show, an 80s music video. But as the narrative unfolds, deeper questions begin to well up, and assumptions about these men and their predicament are completely upended.

The deep roots of Volcano lie in an early fascination with Jean-Paul Sartre’s chamber drama Huis Clos (No Exit), says Murphy. In that play, three characters find themselves trapped in a purgatorial waiting room, possibly for eternity.

“One of the first pieces I ever wrote was very influenced by that,” Murphy says. “I was, like, 21 at the time and, of course, you say to yourself, ‘No problem, I can adapt this existentialist French classic.’ All I can say is that I approached it with all the sincerity of a 21-year-old who didn’t know what he was really on about.”

A little later, in 2009, Murphy joined the British immersive theatre sensations Punchdrunk. He performed with the company for nearly 15 years, featuring in landmark productions including Sleep No More, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The pulse-pounding immersive experience – which is still playing at New York’s McKittrick Hotel – was and remains a huge hit for the company. Murphy played the lead role, among others.

When COVID closed New York theatres, however, Murphy returned home to Ireland, and there he has remained, creating work with his own company, Attic Projects. It was during the COVID period that the ideas for Volcano began to crystallise.

Volcano. Photo © Emijlia Jefrehmova

“It was written very much to be an answer to the question everyone [in the theatre industry] was asking at the time,” Murphy says. “How does live performance survive if everything is just being streamed from an empty theatre? How do you get an audience for something like that when they can just as easily tune into The Mandalorian? To me, it seemed that theatre was trying to compete in a world it wasn’t made for and didn’t really understand all that well.”

Murphy took classes in TV writing to see how the form differs and how TV shows get their audiences hooked. Those techniques, he says, are baked into Volcano.

“At first, it was made to be watched as one episode a day, with a filmed version released alongside it, so that you could watch an episode live and then see the rest at home. Or maybe you’d see the TV version and then want to see the live episode. I liked the idea that people could carve their own trajectory through it.”

When Murphy ran the work in its entirety, he wasn’t entirely sure it would succeed.

“I thought we’d look like a couple of hardcore psychopaths. Who would want to spend four hours with something like that?”

His doubts were quickly erased, however. “With something as long as this, the audience can’t help but form a relationship with us when we’re out there – and we never leave the stage. You just can’t help but feel a little bit drawn in by the effort of the performance itself, which is also very much entangled with the characters.”

Volcano. Photo © Emijlia Jefrehmova

Does Murphy regard Volcano as an Irish work?

“Geez, that’s a complicated one,” he smiles. “I’m Irish, but I’m also part of a generation of people who moved away from Ireland during the financial crash. I was part of that generation for whom there were no jobs, no opportunities. So many of us left for England, America, or Australia, and I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about Irish identity.”

Though born and raised in Cork, Murphy has spent most of his adult life in the United States. “Because I only came back a couple of years ago, thinking about what defines ‘Irish’ work is still a very amorphous thing to me. But I do think that, in a fundamental sort of way, my writing is very Irish; my turns of phrase are Irish, my sense of humour… I think it’s only now that I’m back in the show that I’m realising what parts of me are linked to this country and this culture.”

Murphy is curious to see how the work will be received in Brisbane. “I have an understanding of the theatre traditions in Ireland and in New York. I know what it is to be successful in those countries and why audiences were gravitating towards it. When you take it somewhere else, to a place with different aesthetic values… it’s quite exciting to imagine how that will go.”

Volcano plays from 30 August – 14 September at Brisbane Powerhouse, part of the 2024 Brisbane Festival.