Tom Murphy’s Theatre of Everyday Space

By the time of his death in 2018, Tom Murphy was widely recognised as one of Ireland’s most important modern playwrights. Ireland’s experience of rapid modernisation, emigration, and globalisation is vividly captured in his plays, challenging generic notions of space, place, and the nation. In particular, his drama reconfigures Irish theatre’s uneasy relationship with globalisation, with the peasant kitchen, the pub, and the bog having traditionally been exported as the quintessential Irish spac