DRUIDMURPHY is the story of Irish emigration; a story both of those who went and those who were left behind. Told through three of the greatest plays of Tom Murphy; Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine, DruidMurphy is a major celebration of one of Ireland’s most respected living dramatists.

Crossing oceans and spanning decades, DruidMurphy covers the period from The Great Hunger of the 19th century to the ‘new’ Ireland of the 70s, exploring what we mean when we call a place home.

DruidMurphy is presented in a co-production with Quinnipiac University Connecticut, NUI Galway, Lincoln Center Festival and Galway Arts Festival.

Full details for Conversations on a Homecoming

Full details for A Whistle in the Dark

Full details for Famine

The DruidMurphy Experience

You can choose to see one of the plays, see all three individually over separate evenings or experience all three plays together in a single day. The DruidMurphy cycle day includes an afternoon and an evening break.

These DruidMurphy cycle days are anticipated as being one of the theatrical highlights of 2012. Early booking is advised.

DruidMurphy is presented in a co-production with Quinnipiac University Connecticut, NUI Galway, Lincoln Center Festival and Galway Arts Festival.

Druid would like to acknowledge the continued support of the Arts Council in funding this production and also the support of Culture Ireland in funding its international touring programme.

The ensemble for DruidMurphy is listed below. To see the cast for each individual play, go to: ‘Conversations’ page »  ‘Whistle’ page »  Famine page »

DruidMurphy Trailer of all Three Plays

Behind the Scenes at the First Day of Technical Rehearsals

Garry Hynes talks about Tom Murphy with Boo Froebel at Lincoln Center Festival

Garry Hynes talks about the three DruidMurphy plays with Boo Froebel at Lincoln Center Festival

2012 END OF YEAR THEATRE REVIEWS

DruidMurphy featured in many end of year reviews as the theatre highlight of 2012. For a selection of these reviews, please click here.

REVIEWS

The Washington Post (19.10.12) – Click here to read the full review

“Hynes directs this play with the stealth of a safe cracker. The treasure she extracts is the fine craftsmanship of a writer with whom we all need to get better acquainted.”

New York Times – Click here to read the full review

“As always with this remarkable company, the acting is of a quality to leave you dumbstruck with admiration.”

“visceral, precise and saturated with raw wit and honest feeling.”

The Daily Telegraph – 5 Stars ★★★★★ Read Full Review Here

“attendance should be obligatory”

“thanks to productions so faultless they’re no effort to sit through – even in one marathon day”

The Financial Times – 5 Stars ★★★★★ Read Full Review Here

“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.”

“Murphy is, I suspect, the greatest dramatist writing in English.”

What’s On Stage.Com – 5 Stars ★★★★★ Read Full Review Here

“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”

“These are snapshots of a nation’s history, fleshed out in scenes of intense theatricality in Garry Hynes’s superb productions”

The Guardian – 4 Stars ★★★★ Read Full Review Here

“richly rewarding event”

“staged by Hynes with a breathtaking poetic realism” (On Conversations on a Homecoming)

“Murphy’s viscerally powerful play” (On A Whistle in the Dark)

“I emerged astonished both by Murphy’s historical awareness and Druid’s ensemble vigour.”

The Times – 4 Stars ★★★★ Read Full Review Here

“Viewed in its entirety, DruidMurphy is truly epic, broad of scope, its insight profound, its clear-sightedness both cruel and compassionate. Remarkable.”

“Impeccably acted in meticulous, stirringly evocative productions by Druid’s founder Garry Hynes, 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.”

The Irish Times – Read Full Review Here

“a riveting, shattering and deeply necessary journey.”

“Druid remind you that no one has articulated the legacy of dispossession as eloquently or unflinchingly as Murphy.”

“These plays may be seen separately, giving the density of thought and emotion in Murphy’s work time to unravel, but viewed together the works abound with rewarding echoes and insistent, pressing whispers, threaded through with striking visual motifs and the illuminating torch of extraordinary performers. Druid’s collaboration with Murphy is a staggering achievement and here it lets the plays speak to us as urgently as they ever did.”

The Irish Independent – Read Full Review Here

“It is a privilege to watch theatre of such indelible quality.”

“Under Hynes’ masterful direction, this is a remarkable theatrical achievement, in scope, vision and execution.”

The Stage – Read Full Review Here

“DruidMurphy presents a rare opportunity to survey a span of one writer’s works, namely Tom Murphy”

“Though the plays were conceived as separate entities, not as a trilogy, the boldness and brilliance of Druid’s cross-cast production grants them a stylistic unity, staged inside the same frame of corrugated iron sheeted walls but distinctly designed environments by Francis O’Connor that stretch from a pub and lounge to crop fields.”

The Sunday Independent – Read Full Review Here

“Tom Murphy, veteran genius of the Irish theatre, is still in the ascendant after this extraordinary, overwhelmingly magnificent undertaking.”

“The ensemble acting for the three pieces… is quite extraordinary.”

“There is no weak moment, no weak line, no weak movement.”

Irish Theatre Magazine – Read Full Review Here

““The great strength of Hynes’s direction is the manner in which she manages to marshal such intensity of thought and feeling across the three plays, communicated by an extraordinarily attuned and committed ensemble with such clarity and effect.”

GENERAL PRESS COVERAGE

Washington Post Interview with Garry Hynes and Tom Murphy – October 2012

Vanity Fair – Spotlight Interview & Photo with Tom Murphy and Garry Hynes – August, 2012

“In the past, Hynes and Murphy together have produced the very best of Irish theater. Re-united, they are likely to cause sparks to fly.” (Excerpt from interview by Colm Tóibín)

The New York Times – Interview with Tom Murphy and Garry Hynes – 27.06.12

“Ms. Hynes is perhaps the ideal person to remind the world about Tom Murphy”

The Paris Review – Interview with Tom Murphy 09.07.12

“Sit in a theater for a Tom Murphy play and I can guarantee you one thing: you will come out of that theater rattled, and throttled, and staggered, in the best of all possible ways.”

“There’s nobody like him writing today.”

The Irish Times – 25 Things to Look forward to in 2012 – 31.12.11

“It begins with a faith so rigid that it cannot be eaten away by the Great Hunger. It continues in 1960s Coventry, where an uprooted Irish family is tearing itself apart. And it concludes in a Galway pub where reunited friends seek new beliefs in a disenchanted Ireland. The tragedy of famine, as Tom Murphy saw it, was that “a hungry and demoralised people become silent”. Starting in May, the restorative journey of DruidMurphy, a staging of Tom Murphy’s Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming, which will tour Ireland, London and the US, is the story of a nation. Essential.”