Theatre of Tom Murphy

Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published widely on Shakespeare and on Irish literature: his books include The Politics of Irish Drama (1999), Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (2002), Yeats’s Poetic Codes ( 2008), Synge and Edwardian Ireland ( 2011), co-edited with Brian Cliff. He has written extensively on Murphy, including editing the volume of essays Talking about Tom Murphy (2001) and writing the Introduction to Tom Murphy, Plays: 5 (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2006).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Murphy retrospectivesPart I: Society, history, reality1. Dispossession and displacement: A Whistle in the Dark, On the Outside/ On the Inside, A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant2. Imagining history: Famine, The Patriot Game3. Failure and success: Conversations on a Homecoming, The White House4. The obsession with property: The House, The Wake, The Last Days of a Reluctant TyrantPart II: Fable, folklore, vision5. Beyond reality, beyond religion: The Sanctuary Lamp, The Morning after Optimism, The Blue Macushla 6. Words and music: The Gigli Concert, Too Late for Logic7. Living with loss: Bailegangaire, A Thief of a Christmas, The Alice TrilogyPart III: Interviews8. Interview with Tom Murphy9. ‘Teaching Bailegangaire in America’, Lucy McDiarmid (Montclair State University, USA)10. ‘Living on in Tom Murphy’, Alexandra Poulain (University of Lille 3, France)ConclusionEndnotesIndex

The best and most complete [book on Murphy] that anyone has yet produced and all future scholars and critics will use it as a diving board from which to plunge into Murphy's deep and turbulent waters.