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The Great Hunger and The Gallant John-Joe

The Great Hunger and The Gallant John-Joe

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Author: Tom Mac Intyre
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The Great Hunger, Tom Mac Intyre’s internationally celebrated play of 1983, and The Gallant John-Joe, his most recent dramatic work, show Mac Intyre to be one of the most daringly and excitingly original Irish writers working today.

The Great Hunger is Mac Intyre’s version of Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem of the same name. It represents the life and dreams of Patrick Maguire, Monaghan small farmer and potato-gatherer, a man suffering from sexual and spiritual starvation. The play fuses image, movement and language into a classic of contemporary Irish drama.

The Gallant John-Joe is the soliloquy of John-Joe Concannon, a Cavan widower grappling with physical and mental infirmity and trying unsuccessfully to plumb the mysteries of his relationship with his troubled daughter. His Lear-like cry, by turns tragic and uproariously funny, is both instantly recognizable and marvellously strange, a creation only Mac Intyre could have brought to the stage, and the page.

‘The poem is about the way I was brought up. We’re talking about my life. It isn’t a penal poem lodged in the 1940s and 1950s. This is a poem about Ireland, saying at least in one aspect, “What are we going to do about the Patrick Maguire inside us?” Being brought up in Ireland everyone is affected by that malady of “Don’t touch me and I may not touch you.’ – Tom Mac Intyre

Details

ISBN: 9781901866834

Extent: 96

Published:

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Praise and Reviews

  • ‘Tom Mac Intyre is in the forefront of the theatrical avant-garde in this country. From The Great Hunger to Kitty O’Shea, his plays are inventive and provoking, brimming with a heady mix of dramatic gesture, verbal zest, bodytalk. They make lightning and repeated raids on the erotic zones of consciousness and behaviour, challenging sexual repressions that can wreck the individual as well as rattle the body politic.’ – Eamon Grennan, Irish Times

  • ‘Mac Intyre’s work seems astonishingly singular. He is the only one who completely takes off where Beckett left off. The dream landscapes of his theatre work in the eighties are to me the most significant thing that was happening in theatre.’ – Michael Harding

  • ‘A torrent of mumblings and malapropisms, of mediaeval dialect and pop slang, of yearning tenderness and murderous xenophobic rantings.’ – Irish Times

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About the Author

Tom Mac Intyre, born in Cavan in 1931, is the author of many works of fiction, poetry and plays, includingStories of the Wandering Moon(2000), The Great HungerandThe Gallant John-Joe(2002).

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Image: Bryan O'Brien