'to Fly by Those Nets': Violence and Identity in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 2001, the Abbey Theatre staged a season devoted to the plays of Torn Murphy, a playwright rated by Michael Billington as one of Irish theatre's proudest possessions. As Billington goes on to remark, however, Murphy is also one of Ireland's 'least known exports'. (1) By comparison with contemporaries such as Brian Friel, his work has received surprisingly little critical attention. The opening play of that Murphy season--appropriately enough his 1961 debut, A Whistle in the Dark--seemed to crystallize the paradox surrounding this playwright. This often-overlooked text now seemed 'one of the great postwar Irish plays'. (2) Murphy himself, attending the event, was 'astonished' upon seeing the play again at 'how extraordinarily well-structured the play is. I wish I could now structure a play as well as A Whistle in the Dark.' (3) And yet this play has often been overlooked critically. In part, this is because the 'classic' Murphy themes, familiar from later works such as Bailegangaire (1985) and Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), appear less than obvious in this early play: Murphy's theatrical project is seen by Shaun Richards, for example, to revolve around the dramatization of a Benjaminian 'redemption of the future by means of the past', and whilst the roots of such a project are detected in Whistle, this is only 'in complex and partially formulated ways'. (4) This essay will explore the complexities of Whistle by focusing upon the entanglement of issues of nation, migration, gender, and class which appear there. By way of conclusion, a brief comparison will then be made with Murphy's first play of the twenty-first century, The House (2000) which, despite a gap of forty years, can be seen as a companion piece. If, as Richards argues, Whistle moves towards a Benjaminian idea of redemption, it is one centrally concerned with the problems and obstacles thrown up by working-class migration, specifically those of masculinity and national identity. According to Murphy, Whistle springs from his own experience of migrant Irish workers in England: The play is an exploration of the complex interpenetration of various discourses of identity, then, around class and gender, and of the effect that this overdetermination has upon ideas of the nation at a particular moment in the history of the ('postcolonial') Irish State.