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THEATRE: Argument, through poetry, to song in Druid Murphy's stories of Irish emigration

 

Niall Buggy and Eileen Walsh in A Whistle In The Dark

Published: 28 June, 2012
by HOWARD LOXTON

DRUID MURPHY
Hampstead Theatre

Druid Murphy is a presentation by Galway’s Druid Theatre Company of three plays by Irish playwright Tom Murphy. You can see them either individually or all three the same day. They weren’t written to be played together but all explore some aspect of Irish emigration.

Conversations on a Homecoming is set in a pub run by JJ who named it The White House in the euphoric days of the Kennedy era.

Here former regular Michael, returned from 10 years in America trying to work as an actor, meets up with former best friend, schoolteacher Tom and his old mates.

In 105 minutes it encapsulates a whole evening that moves, as one character puts it, from argument through poetry to song, as we discover the disintegration of their dreams.

The other plays are longer. A Whistle in the Dark is set in Coventry, where another Michael lives with his West Midland’s wife.

When his Dada and fighting brothers arrive to settle an old feud between them and the Mulryans, his loyalty to his wife or to the savagely brutal Carneys is sorely tested.

Famine presents the tragic situation of the Irish peasantry with the failure of the continuing potato crop and forced emigration, set against the attitudes of landowners and government.

Murphy’s dialogue sounds very natural but is carefully constructed, almost musical in form.

Famine is much less naturalistic and Francis O’Connor’s setting moves from the realism of the first play though a partial stylisation to an abstract presentation.

It is beautifully played by this fine company under Garry Byrne’s direction: Garrett Lombard exactly captures the schoolmaster; Aaron Monaghan, a drinker incoherently trying to convince himself he’s a success, Niall Buggy as a terrifying Dada, Eileen Walsh the frightened English wife and Brian Doherty as the baffled John Connor trying to understand what is happening to his family and friends in Famine.

Together these plays make an extraordinary and disturbing impact.

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