DruidMurphy: Plays by Tom Murphy

Richly rewarding … Conversations on a Homecoming … offers a microcosm of Irish life and what is extraordinary is how much of it Murphy packs in: the failed dreams, the love of drink, the male fear of women and the emergence of a bustling class of entrepreneurs … the play pins down better than any work I know the Irish need to escape … with A Whistle in the Dark … Murphy’s viscerally powerful play shows a fighting Irish family, the Carneys … what Murphy captures perfectly is the rootlessness of the myth-making Carneys … with Famine … we see the real source of Ireland’s tragedy … I emerged astonished … by Murphy’s historical awareness. -- Michael Billington * Guardian *
Urgent and visceral … Murphy exposes the anguished concerns of people whose self-respect has been stunted [in Conversations on a Homecoming]. The dialogue deals chiefly in disappointment. But this is not a gloomy piece. Humiliation is tempered by humour, poignancy, affection, singing … the playwright is unsparing with his characters, yet compassionate – no arch-villains, no lost causes … [A Whistle in the Dark] moves at threatening, erratic pace: imminent, explosive violence diffuses and returns … [Famine] proceeds to the most harrowing and beautiful climax I have seen on stage … Themes of emigration? “Universal themes” would be truer. Murphy is, I suspect, the greatest dramatist writing in English. -- Alexander Gilmour * Financial Times *
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. -- Sam Marlowe * The Times *