The three plays in this mini-retrospective of Tom Murphy’s work are urgent, visceral, and superbly acted

Tom Murphy once wrote, “Living in the 1960s, I found that I was a famine victim, that it wasn’t over . . . Famine to me meant twisted mentalities, poverty of love, tenderness and affection; the natural extravagance of youth wanting to bloom – to blossom – but being stalemated by a 19th-century mentality.”

DruidMurphy is a touring mini-retrospective of the Irish playwright’s work, performed by Galway’s Druid theatre company. It comprises three plays, written between 1961 and 1985, that are linked by themes of emigration – or, more precisely, emigration prompted by famine, progenitor of hopelessness and humiliation, source of a trauma that isn’t “over”. Drama lies in the attempts to cope with abject conditions of living – physical, psychological, spiritual.

Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine are set between 1846 and the 1970s. They do not form a trilogy, but a contrasting, complementary unit. And all lack the mood of cosy detachment that often accompanies period pieces: they feel urgent and visceral.

Conversations on a Homecoming, the most recent in writing and setting, takes place in the west of Ireland, inside a backwater pub. Village clocks strike at different times; wallpaper is peeling and stained; a pretty barmaid – Anne – gazes gravely into space. Old pals congregate in honour of Michael, an actor, “home” from New York. Little happens – just dialogue and booze through a fug of nicotine. Nothing is resolved. But life – life that you can touch and smell – emerges through the fug.

Tom, a schoolteacher who wanted to be a writer, niggles at Michael’s idealistic pretensions. Tom has never left Ireland. He is belligerent, barbed, but brilliant. Michael’s dreams look flimsy; stardom has eluded him; he borrows money from his mum. Tom and Michael joust while Junior sits in between, a decent, hulking man, dogged with worry about his next pint. Liam drinks slightly apart – semi-aloof, semi-outcast – a tawdry capitalist, half-scorned by his peers. The future is his, they think.

Murphy exposes the anguished concerns of people whose self-respect has been stunted. The dialogue deals chiefly in disappointment. But this is not a gloomy piece. Humiliation is tempered by humour, poignancy, affection, singing.

The ensemble is excellent, especially Garrett Lombard’s Tom – intelligent, acerbic and pitiable – Eileen Walsh’s Peggy, Tom’s delightfully neurotic fiancée of 10 years, and Marty Rea’s romantic, callow Michael.

The playwright is unsparing with his characters, yet compassionate – no arch-villains, no lost causes. Miraculously, we side with them all.

A Whistle in the Dark takes place in Coventry in 1960. Britain is riddled with anti-Irish prejudice – “Paddy” jokes are the least of it. Michael Carney, an Irish immigrant, lives with his English wife, Betty. His father and four brothers come to stay. Michael wants to fit in with his adopted society; the Carney brawlers want to fight everyone.

Conflict centres on a street battle proposed between the Carneys and another feral Irish family. Michael won’t fight and he begs his brothers not to. They call him a coward – “a mangy dog” – which, maybe, he is. It is a play about male posturing and paranoia, prestige, tribalism and pathetic inadequacy. It is entirely compelling. Savagery is interlaced with bathos and music. Father – “Dada” – threatens to thrash his grown-up son; later he’s drinking lonesomely, singing, boasting of his great intelligence – “I’m reading the history of ancient Greece.”

It moves at threatening, erratic pace: imminent, explosive violence diffuses and returns. We never settle.

Again, the ensemble is very good. Aaron Monaghan is superb as Harry, one of the brothers – brutal, boiling, hurt. Niall Buggy’s “Dada” is an astounding display of bombastic ferocity mixed with lonely terror.

Famine is the biggest of these plays, in scale and subject matter. It portrays the most emotive event in Ireland’s history, when the potatoes failed and the people had to choose between starving and boarding a ship bound for the New World. Murphy never moralises.

Imagery is stylised: tableaux of emaciated figures against jagged, corrugated iron; a ragged child crouched beneath the politicians’ table. Muscular brushstrokes are punctuated with intimacy, lyricism, hope. The mood dips and darts: a waif-like girl is kissed for the first time: a justice of the peace is shot, then kicked viciously by the crippled Mickeleen – “slaves can be tyrants too”. It proceeds to the most harrowing and beautiful climax I have seen on stage.

I can find no weak links in Druid’s production. The cast is talented; Francis O’Connor’s designs are unobtrusively stylish; and Garry Hynes directs with wisdom and feeling.

Themes of emigration? “Universal themes” would be truer. Murphy is, I suspect, the greatest dramatist writing in English. After nine hours in Hampstead, it was hard not to think so.

Irish theatre company Druid perform a collection of work by playwright Murphy in a production that is faultless, according to Dominic Cavendish.

A handful of blackened potatoes are wrenched out of the earth and stared at in dismay. The harrowing first scene of “Famine” (1968), part of a feast of work by the Irish playwright Tom Murphy served up by Galway company Druid during a brief stop-off in London, confronts us with a searing historical image of blight and a potent piece of symbolism.

Those few malformed tubers spell hunger and starvation for the inhabitants of the fictional village of Glanconor – circa 1846 – and also signify ruin and emigration on an unrivalled scale for a country in the supposedly civilised West.

It may seem crudely reductive to attribute the rich harvest of Murphy’s career to a calamity that happened 90 years before his birth. Yet thanks to productions so faultless they’re no effort to sit through – even in one marathon day – director Garry Hynes and her superlative 16-strong ensemble help us see “The Great Famine” as a crucial source of inspiration. In his portraits of bruised and bruising men, of subdued, exasperated women, in the fire and crackle of his dialogue, with its flashes of humour and fierce contrariness, lies a deep buried trauma.

The aftershocks of the famine – possibly the most shaming chapter in our colonial past – are registered in the violence and discord that rumbles away and rears up in ordinary places: in a forlorn Galway pub in the early 1970s in Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), and in a Coventry home in A Whistle in the Dark (1961).

In the former, a sorry group of male friends convene for a pint or three to hear what one of their number – the still-aspiring actor Michael – has been up to for the last 10 years in Swinging London. His insubstantial conversational titbits are grist to the bitter mill of one of the clique in particular – the grouchy Tom – who wears his own lack of prospects as a perverse badge of pride and makes every effort to put the outsider in his place, with much barbed geniality.

An even stronger sense of resentment towards the self-bettering émigré is whipped up in Murphy’s ferocious, often savagely entertaining breakthrough play, A Whistle in the Dark. Michael Carney, the most intelligent and get-ahead of five brothers – who has made a new life and acquired an English wife over the water – is dragged down to a point of no return by the whole visiting feral clan, led by his merciless father, a man for whom attack is always the best form of defence.

There simply isn’t space here to do justice to the performances, excellent across the board from actors as distinguished and cherished as Mary Mullen, Niall Buggy and Eileen Walsh. This is at once a monumental survey of an underrated playwright and of Ireland itself. If the question many Irish have had to ask is: “Do I stay or go?”, so far as English audiences are concerned, attendance should be obligatory.

 

The nine-hour triptych of Tom Murphy plays that comprise DruidMurphy – Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), A Whistle in the Dark (1961) and Famine (1968) – are about the Irish experience of emigration and home-coming, from the potato famine to the ‘new’ prosperity of the 1970s.

And they prove a high-five Hibernian highlight of the year so far, a fantastic tear-sodden blast of the very best in Irish theatre. Garry Hynes leads her Galway-based Druid company in triumph and despair, twin impostors of the Celtic dream and nightmare.

Tom Murphy is a leading theatrical and literary figure of our time, and as great a dramatist as Brian Friel, something they know in Dublin and Galway, but not necessarily in London where, ironically, his first big success, A Whistle in the Dark, was premiered.

That play, a violent domestic tragedy of a set of Mayo ‘iron men’ descending on Coventry in Warwickshire in their boots and suits to visit the family’s eldest son, Michael, in 1960, comes across as an impassioned pre-emptive strike against both Harold Pinter and Edward Bond. It’s brutal, nasty, and deeply upsetting and compelling in equal measure. And it punctuates Conversations on a Homecoming, a lyrical Galway pub drama in which another “favoured” son, also called Michael, returns to his sleepy backwater from New York in the early 1970s; and Famine, which charts the repercussions of the catastrophic Great Hunger in a fictional rural community of 1846.

The Druid performances, which visit New York, Galway and Oxford next month, and tour Ireland thereafter, are part of the London 2012 Festival, and a brave part, too: many Londoners, myself included, are here because of the famine, and subsequent emigration waves, and Murphy’s dramas attempt to assess how notions of ‘home’ and ‘the old country’ sit with the desire for escape, renewal, return and spiritual possession.

In Conversations, a rich and hilarious precursor of both Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, Michael’s New York career as an actor may be suspect; how does ‘home’ receive or assess what we do ‘away’? You’re welcome back, but hated for having gone in the first place: we had to carry on without you, and don’t we just love to have a good old moan about it into our pints?

Marty Rea, who plays both Michaels, conveys this ambiguity quite beautifully, while Garrett Lombard as the teacher who stayed behind and Aaron Monaghan as the shifty small-time entrepreneur lock horns either side in a battle for status on the home patch. A picture of President Kennedy adorns the stark grey walls of the Whitehouse pub: 10 years after his death, the countryside still claims inspirational affiliation; from JFK, and from the absentee landlord, JJ, who’s out on a binge.

All of these plays acquire new resonance in the wake of the Celtic Tiger’s demise and the collapse of the economy. Ireland is a “last refuge” claims Monaghan’s gesticulating wide-boy, but for what, and for whom? They all get drunk, as do the fighting Mayo boys in Whistle, led by Niall Buggy’s extraordinary dominating Dada, a former policeman who may not be as big as his boom or his bite.

‘Irish men shouldn’t get married’, says Eileen Walsh’s abused Warwickshire housewife, counterpart to her simpering, tolerant but equally anxious fiancée in Conversations. The combination of poverty, religion and family forms a toxic poison in relationships; political oppression justifies the tragic fall-out.

Famine, the one play I’d not seen before, is the most astonishing; a poetic and elliptical stew of Brecht, O’Neill and wild folk music, with a child’s funeral, a desperate scramble among the blighted potato crops, a confrontation between armed peelers and angry peasants, a dissection of emigration policy as, in effect, land enclosures, and a monumental performance from Brian Doherty as the heroically conflicted and beleaguered farmer.

These are snapshots of a nation’s history, fleshed out in scenes of intense theatricality in Garry Hynes’s superb productions, all three plays designed by [Francis O’Connor] and lit by Chris Davey within an echoing surround of slanting corrugated iron, tinged with burnt soil, a landscape that retrospectively consumes both village pub and Coventry rough house.