Hampstead, LondonSurvivors of Gatz will not shrink at the thought of a nine-hour day spent watching three plays by the fantastic Irish dramatist, Tom Murphy. Garry Hynes, who directs them for Galway’s Druid corporation, is emphatic they should not be dubbed a trilogy, since they span 25 years of Murphy’s writing lifetime. However what emerges from this richly rewarding event, which tours Ireland, the US and the UK until the end of October, is Murphy’s obsession with emigration and its impact on Irish identity.You see this most clearly in Conversations on a Homecoming, staged by Hynes with a breathtaking poetic realism. Locate in a run-down Galway bar in the 1970s, it confronts Michael, returning after a 10-year absence in Fresh York, with his ancient drinking chums dominated by a cynical teacher, Tom. As in Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the bar offers a microcosm of Irish lifetime and what is extraordinary is how much of it Murphy packs in: the failed dreams, the like of drink, the male dread of women and the emergence of a bustling class of entrepreneurs. Perfectly played by Marty Rea as the returning Michael, Garrett Lombard as the embittered teacher and Eileen Walsh as the latter’s eternal fiancee, the play pins down bigger than any employment I know the Irish demand to escape.With A Whistle in the Dark, Murphy deals with the consequences of emigration. Pre-dating “in-yer-face” theatre by distinct decades, Murphy’s viscerally powerful play shows a fighting Irish family, the Carneys, locate down in Coventry in 1960 and engaging in a pitched battle with a rival clan. The play is often compared to Pinter’s The Homecoming, however I am reminded more of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in that we see the family intellectual drawn into appalling violence. However what Murphy captures perfectly is the rootlessness of the myth-making Carneys. Niall Buggy also gives a mesmerising performance as the raging bull of a father who turns outside to be a hollow sham.It is only with Famine, however, that we see the absolute source of Ireland’s tragedy. Locate in County Mayo in 1846, the play charts the impact of the potato famine on a rural community: it breeds not just suffering, however also leads the landlords to launch a policy of mass emigration. This is Murphy at his most Brechtian; however the scene I shall not forget is that in which Brian Doherty as an obdurate village leader is forced to turn his head away from a landlord’s agent in condition he contaminates him with his very breath. After a extended however engrossing day, I emerged astonished both by Murphy’s historical awareness and Druid’s ensemble vigour.Rating: 4/5TheatreMichael Billingtonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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