December 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier.

Three decades later the crime remains unsolved. The cold case review begun by gardaí in 2022 has yet to be completed.

Towards the end of 2025 I found myself thinking about Sophie Toscan Du Plantier in the context of a play.

Nine years previously I had written a play about Michael Collins, A Great Arrangement, which touched on Collins’ death in Beal na Bláth in 1922.

As well as playing the Everyman Theatre in Cork and the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, the Collins play had a memorably-charged performance in the Town Hall, Skibbereen.

But with Sophie I didn’t want to write a play that would deal with the murder. We have had a number of books published that address it in detail, similarly two TV documentary series, a podcast and a feature film by Jim Sheridan that evaluated the evidence.

I wanted to concentrate on the victim of the murder. Who was Sophie? What precisely was her connection with West Cork? And why was it that this French lady was alone in her remote house in the wintery run-up to Christmas 1996?

I then discovered that friend and fellow playwright Brendan Griffin shared a similar curiosity. I invited him to collaborate with me. He agreed and a play entitled Toormore is the result of that collaboration.

Toormore is the name of the townland in which Sophie bought a house in 1993. The play will have a rehearsed staged reading in the Town Hall Skibbereen on Sunday December 6 at 8pm. It will be followed by a post-show chat with Brendan and myself.

For a very long time the garda investigation focused on Ian Bailey.

Meanwhile the victim of the crime, Sophie Toscan Du Plantier, had almost become a supporting player in her own devastating personal drama.

Toormore, the play, offers an overview of Sophie’s final weekend and the story is told largely from her point of view. It begins when her flight from Paris touches down at Cork Airport on the afternoon of Friday December 20. It ends when Sophie’s neighbour, Shirley Foster, discovers the body the following Monday morning.

What was it about Toormore and West Cork that spoke so meaningfully to Sophie? Perhaps it was a throwback for her to the considerable time she spent as a young girl in the Lozere region of southern France where her grandparents lived. The Lozere, France’s least populated area, is a place defined by wide open limestone plateaus, a sort of lunar landscape that can quickly overwhelm any sense of self.

In the play we see Sophie wholly engage with the ruggedness of Toormore, with nature, the wind, the rain and animals. In a personal diary that emerged after the murder Sophie had written, with reference to her peregrinations through the fields: “All these conversations took place with the sheep and cattle of west Dunmanus, near Mizen Head.”

Her immersion in the landscape seemed to be a necessary and almost spiritual juxtaposition for her between her intensely busy urban life in France and the raw remoteness of West Cork.

Sophie’s visit to Three Castles Head on the Sunday is the dramatic centre-piece of the play. Sophie would claim that she had seen The Lady of the Lake, the wispy spectral guardian of the ancient fort.

Legend has it: see The Lady and you will die soon after.  What was Sophie’s response to this apparition? According to her friends the Ungerers, who lived close by and who Sophie visited immediately after her encounter with The Lady of the Lake, it may have been apprehension tinged with some degree of exhilaration.

Jean Pierre Gazeau is Sophie’s uncle and the president of the Paris-based Association for Truth and Justice for Sophie Toscan Du Plantier.

In communicating with us he wrote of how “for Sophie’s family and friends it is deeply moving to have Sophie’s life and her love of Toormore honoured through such an artistic endeavour”.

As we approach the 30th anniversary it would be our fervent hope that we can put the focus back, however temporarily, on Sophie herself rather than the evil act that took her life so prematurely.

- Patrick Talbot