Keeper of the flame

Druid’s acclaimed collaboration with Tom Murphy gave his work a new lease of life. Now it is reaching new audiences with a national tour, writes Pádraic Killeen

IT was the theatre event of 2012, a stunning reclamation of the work of Ireland’s finest living playwright by the country’s most consistently daring company. Drawing on an incredible ensemble cast, DruidMurphy staged three of Tom Murphy’s greatest plays — Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark, and Famine — with unerring style and intensity. The show was rightly hailed both at home and abroad, touring to huge plaudits in the US and London.

What added an unmistakable charm to the project was the sense that the production itself marked a sort of homecoming, re-igniting as it did the mercurial symbiosis that the Druid Theatre Company fostered with the Tuam playwright during the 1980s. To see the great Marie Mullen, for instance, playing Missus in Conversations, knowing that she had played the younger female character, Peggy, in the 1985 version, added its own undeniable charm to proceedings.