A collection of three of Tom Murphy's most iconic plays - Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming - covering the period from the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century to the 'new' Ireland of the 1970s.
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.
