"Poor Banished Children of Eve": Tom Murphy and the syntax of history

This essay engages with the work of playwright Tom Murphy and suggests that Murphy synthesizes the dialectic between past and present by representing history as a process of story-telling, where hegemonic Catholic bourgeois nationalist history is contradicted by repressed discourses of class and gender. The aim is to move beyond a reading of Irish theatre grounded in identitarian paradigms of nation and nationalism, towards an engagement with ethical issues of class and gender subordination which are as much a part of Irish cultural politics as the nation is or ever was.