Theatre review: Druid on form with new production of The House, by Tom Murphy
Amy Molloy, Darragh Feehely, and Marty Rea in Druid's production of The House, by Tom Murphy. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★★☆
Though first staged in 2000, The House is something of a companion piece to A Whistle in the Dark, Tom Murphy’s violence-packed 1961 play of the criminal Carneys of Coventry. The House is the flipside: it’s the summer season, and the emigres are back in small-town Ireland. They’ve cash to spend, songs to sing, and fights to have. They’ll return to England and America in a couple of weeks, battered, bruised, and penniless. All to do it again next year.
When the play was last staged, at the Abbey in 2012, it was all too easy to see how Ireland itself had skewed back in its direction. Hard to believe it now, but we were facing the prospect of being a country of emigration, with a property crisis defined by a glut of houses nobody wanted.
But the world turns, and a play resurfaces in a new reality. In this case, an Ireland of immigration, and all its problems and opportunity, one with precisely the opposite housing crisis. What black comedy, eh?
From the point of view of 2024, the play’s concerns of place, and who gets to belong, of homes and houses and what they mean, all that trembles with a certain relevance. But director Garry Hynes is, thankfully, not that interested in these echoes. She does something far more interesting and exciting: like the writer, she is aiming for something universal, and in the process takes the play to a mythic, tragic plane.
That tragedy is principally one man’s: that of the returned, shadily enriched Christy, played with originality, vulnerability, yearning, and danger by the ever brilliant Marty Rea.
Christy, damaged and neglected in childhood, sought shelter in the titular house, Woodlawn, home of the down-at-heel de Burca’s, and the upkeep of which is proving at last too much for the waning matriarch Mrs de Burca, in a stunning performance by Marie Mullen.
Christy is greeted by her in his own childish words: “I want to be this family!”
That’s what the young, refuge-seeking Christy used to say. Like Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, he’s an interloper into the world he wants, and which, now, tantalisingly, he might just have. If only it would not turn to dust on his possession of it.
This is so much Christy’s play here that Hynes has him stalking the set unseen, crouching, wide-eyed and boyish, in corners, to observe the scenes that don’t contain him. Murphy’s is an unflinching portrait of a 1950s small town, packed with brilliantly realised characters, hints of deep-running corruption and unspoken crimes.
But in Hynes’s production Christy’s is often the cracked looking glass through which we see that microcosm of a world. Francis O’Connor’s set picks up on this. The fireplace mirror is already smashed, dozens of shattered fragments dangle like a frozen explosion over her fluid space, which seamlessly switches from bar, to drawing room, to garden.
It’s an already broken world, then. But a vibrantly realised one, staged here by a director on top form and in profound imaginative sympathy with the author. The House is sure to be a festival hit when it transfers to Dublin.
- Until September 21 in Galway. At the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, September 26-October 6 as part of Dublin International Theatre Festival
