The life and soul of the diaspora

Tom Murphy’s emigration trilogy is “an inner history of Ireland,” Garry Hynes tells Alan O’Riordan

THEATRE, by definition, can never be definitive. But that doesn’t mean it can’t try to be, to reach for the kind of statement that outlasts a production’s life on stage. And this is what Druid Theatre and its director Garry Hynes do. It would have been presumptuous of most companies to fuse their name with that of an iconic playwright, but that’s just what the Galway company did in 2005 with DruidSynge, a towering cycle of plays that form a central pillar in the Irish canon.

Now, Druid have done it again, giving to Tom Murphy its stamp in another juggernaut of a project: DruidMurphy, its cycle of three plays — Conversations on a Homecoming, from 1985; A Whistle in the Dark, from 1961; and Famine, first staged in 1968.