A collection of three of Tom Murphy's most iconic plays - Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming - covering the period from the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century to the 'new' Ireland of the 1970s.
This collection brings together three of Tom Murphy's finest plays, Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming. Together, they tell the story of Irish emigration - of those who went and those who were left behind. Crossing oceans and spanning decades, Murphy's three plays cover the period from the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century to the 'new' Ireland of the 1970s, exploring what we mean when we call a place 'home'.
Conversations on a Homecoming: County Galway, 1970s.
Even the humblest of small-town pubs can be a magnet for dreamers. Michael, after a ten-year absence, suddenly returns from New York and has a reunion with old friends, in that same pub 'The White House'.
A Whistle in the Dark: Coventry, 1960
Irish emigrants, the uprooted Carney family, adapt aggressively to life in an English city.
Famine: County Mayo, 1846
In Glanconnor village in the west of Ireland, the second crop of potatoes fails. The community now faces the real prospect of starvation.
With an introduction by Dr Patrick Lonergan, NUI Galway
DruidMurphy, presented by Druid in a co-production with Quinnipiac University Connecticut, NUI Galway, Lincoln Center Festival and Galway Arts Festival, marks a major celebration of one of Ireland's most respected living dramatists and toured Ireland, London and the US in 2012.
Anguished, angry, passionate, poetic and at times violent, this trio of works by the seminal Irish playwright Tom Murphy makes a richly textured and absorbing theatrical experience ? the plays traverse time and oceans to present a kind of dramatic ballad of Ireland and Irishness, musical in its shifts of mood and rhythm, compelling in its complexity and its emotional force ?
Conversations on a Homecoming is an achingly sad, wistful work about unfulfilled potential. Its low-key tenor is interrupted by outbreaks of snarling verbal savagery, a latent threat that explodes into terrifying brutality in
A Whistle in the Dark ... the trio is completed by
Famine ? an almost painterly vision of history that flows, dreamlike, through scenes of great suffering ? The pace is deliberately agonising, the ordeal before us relentless. Viewed in its entirety,
DruidMurphy is truly epic, broad of scope, its insight profound, its clear-sightedness both cruel and compassionate. Remarkable.
