Polymath Carol Murphy proves one to watch in delectably dark Irish folk fable.
Artist, writer and filmmaker, the formidable Carol Murphy performs this one woman show as part of Leake Street’s VAULT Festival. The Body & Blood was written by Murphy over lockdown and launched online in January 2022 as five ten minute shorts filmed on her iPhone. Her first performance of the work as a piece of theatre took place in May last year at The Black Box in Belfast, and is now seeing its London premier at VAULT Festival’s Cavern venue.
Murphy describes the concept as a 19th Century Irish Famine Folk Fable told in verse, the story of Maggie Murtagh, a girl from rural Ireland who transmogrifies into The Vigilante Cannibal Nun after the death of her family. The threat of an unwanted marriage had prompted her escape with a plan to become a missionary nun in China, but upon being sent back to Connemara to set up a convent at the height of The Famine, she discovers her family’s fate and swears her revenge. So begins a rampage of coloniser-eating, rule-breaking violence and defiance, The Famine as a metaphor for madness, guilt and depression, the exaggerated, pantomime-like caricature of Maggie as self-destructive anti-hero opening new spaces in the excavation of invisible female Irish histories.
It is astonishing that Murphy does not come from an acting background – she is a captivating performer, herself transmogrifying into the bardic role with electrifying swagger and aplomb. The performance opens in darkness to a blood-curdling scream which gives way to cackling laughter, marking the onset of a masterclass in physical and vocal dexterity. A born raconteur, her story is punctuated with stamping shuffling sauntering dancing shimmying, the verses alternately fired out lightning-fast, stretched as if over a rack, or deliciously savoured, each lilting word tasted and rolled around in her mouth.
She is bedecked in glittering swag, her gold earrings, chains, belt, shades and tooth endowing her with gangster status, with an applique sacred heart on a white cossack hat, redcoat claimed from one of her victims, and Robin Hood-style boots nodding to revolutionary and Catholic iconography, as well as themes from Irish history. Truly exciting myth-making possibilities emerge, a postmodern reimagining of pre-modernity horror birthing a myriad of potential stories and legends, refuting a single, neat, linear narrative in the telling of a history at every turn.
Murphy deserves a venue in which the acoustics do justice to this work. The echoing Cavern snatched away much of her brilliant writing, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps of Maggie’s otherwise rich and lurid landscape. I was overjoyed to discover the five episodes of her tale at https://www.thebodyandblood.co.uk, as should you be – I highly recommend giving yourself over to a world of bloody vengeance, sex, diamond-thieving, cannibalism and other worldly sins. After all, why not break a few rules?