Clever Blokes and Thick Lads: The Collapsing Tribe in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark

When A Whistle.in the Dark premiered in London and later in Dublin in 1961 and 1962, its critical reception placed Tom Murphy in an exalted pantheon. Like Synge, O'Casey, and Joyce before him, Murphy discomfited his English audiences and enraged his Irish ones by endorsing Yeats's lament, in "September 1913," about "Romantic" Ireland. Emphatically, A Whistle concurs, it's "in the grave." In fact, Murphy's characters have found Ireland so sepulchral that most of them have abandoned it entirely, in search of better fortune on English shores. Not surprisingly, the results are bleak. Like Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (which premiered just three years later in 1964), A Whistle depicts emigration as a delusory promise that only gets you, as the song says, "right back where [you] started from." But what distinguishes A Whistle from Philadelphia is Murphy's unflinching portrait of a class-based destiny that serves, ironically, to unite those age-old enemies, England and Ireland. In A Whistle, class be...