Irish Theatre of Florida presents The Country Boy by John Murphy

The Country Boy, a play written by John Murphy, portrays emigration and rural Ireland of the fifties. Although the nature of emigration has changed since the play was first produced in the late 1950's, the essentials of the existential condition which it explains have if anything become more rather than less pronounced in the meantime. The play also uses a certain time, setting and subject to tell a timeless and universal truth. What is the truth? The idea that we call 'emigration' is something else. The idea of the pursuit of happiness through movement, travel, the far-away hill, or the pull of the bright lights. The idea of the 'Dream', whether of America or anywhere else, is a will-o-the-wisp which draws our gaze first away, and then forever backwards. The idea of the relationship between time and place and the reality, which we seem incapable of absorbing, that without this relationship we are left with a placeless unease. The idea that we believe ourselves capable of happiness only in a place in which we happen not to be. And the trick life plays on us in making us imagine that we can live out our dreams perpetually without ever having to live with them. The Country Boy manages to express, enact and dramatise all these ideas. It achieves this largely through the characters of Eddie and Curley the two brothers approaching their dreams from opposite directions.