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 20120624 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 20120626 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 20120625