The School of English cordially invites you to attend the following seminar offered by Dr. Moonyoung Hong:

Tom Murphy and Modern Theatre: Diasporic Tragedies and Everyday Space

Dr. Moonyoung Hong, City University of Hong Kong

May 27, 2024, Monday, 4:30 p.m.

Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Tom Murphy (1935-2018), widely recognised as one of the most significant Irish playwrights of the past fifty years, is often acclaimed as a leading figure of his generation alongside Brian Friel. Despite the regular performances of his works both in Ireland and on international stages, Murphy’s contributions to the development of modern tragedy remain relatively under-theorised in academic criticism. The talk explores his influence both on contemporary Irish theatre and modern drama more broadly, focusing on his tragic plays in relation to diasporic experiences. By uncovering the distinctive links between Murphy’s tragic practice and the concept of diaspora, I offer new perspectives in Murphy scholarship, thereby filling a crucial gap in the current understanding and interpretation of his works. Displacement caused by physical and emotional detachment, and by the new attachments that are forged in different places, poses complex psychological questions about identity and modernity. In exploring these diasporic changes, Murphy contributes to a wider trend to displace tragedy into the realm of everyday life. Murphy’s tragic plays deal with both the micro- and macro- experiences of migration, from the familial tale of Irish labour migrants in England in A Whistle in the Dark (1961) to the Great Hunger in Famine (1968): the defining historical event that led to a mass exodus of the Irish population, and the basis for foundational narratives of the Irish diaspora. I will showcase new ways of reading Murphy’s works, using his manuscript papers (“avant-textes”) via genetic criticism and materials from the digitised theatre archives for performance analysis. These additional dimensions reveal new insights into the ethics and aesthetics of representing historical traumas, contributing to the debate on “the death of tragedy” (Steiner, 1961) in modern theatre.

Moonyoung Hong is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. She specialises in Irish literature, with an MPhil in Irish Writing and a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Drama, Irish Studies Review, Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) and Études Irlandaises. She is author of Tom Murphy's Theatre of Everyday Space (under contract with Routledge, 2025) and co-editor of The Irish Pub: Invention and Re-Invention (under contract with Cork University Press, 2025).