Major Druid project puts spotlight on Tuam playwright Tom Murphy

Date Published: {J}

Rehearsals begin in March for DruidMurphy, which will see Druid Theatre celebrate the work of Tuam playwright Tom Murphy by staging three of his major plays.

Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming will be performed in Galway in May under the collective title DruidMurphy and the project will have its London premiere in June in Hampstead Theatre, as part of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad.

DruidMurphy will then travel to America before returning to Galway for a fortnight as part of Galway Arts Festival. The plays will be staged in the city’s Town Hall Theatre and will also tour to three locations in the county. These venues have yet to be confirmed, but Murphy’s hometown of Tuam is likely to be included.

The Murphy project – which is the biggest project in Druid’s history – has been in the pipeline for the past three or four years, according to the company’s Artistic Director Garry Hynes, explaining that the three particular plays were selected because they have a unifying theme.

“It’s not like Synge,” she says referring to Druid’s previous venture of

this nature, DruidSynge which premiered in 2005 when the company staged all of Synge’s plays together.

“Playboy was the biggest of the six and there were three one-act plays.

“Tom’s canon is too big for one single production so we had to look at plays that would make sense together as a cycle. These tell about going and leaving and coming back and explain what it is to be part of a nation, what it is to leave and what happens to those who stay . . . the people who go away and the people who are left behind and what it means.”

DruidMurphy revives the long-standing relationship between Tom Murphy and Druid, which began in the 1980s and was revived in 2009 when The Gigli Concert officially opened Druid Lane Theatre as part of Galway Arts Festival.

During the 1980s, Tom Murphy was Writer-in-Association with Druid. His plays Bailegangaire and Conversations on a Homecoming received their world premieres in Druid Lane Theatre and were directed by Garry Hynes. She also directed Famine for Druid and A Whistle in the Dark for the Abbey Theatre, also in the 1980s.

But for the director, it’s not a simple question of revisiting works with which she is familiar; in fact she describes her relationship with these plays as being “a lifetime away”.

“It feels different. You are different,” she says of this new exploration.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.