In vino veritas; and so in Guinness, whiskey and poteen. Much booze is consumed and much that is true spoken in the three plays — unconnected save in their authorship — that make up DruidMurphy. They are presented by Druid in a welcome return to Oxford Playhouse this week and celebrate this Irish company’s long association with their writer, Tom Murphy.

The most alcohol drenched of the three is Conversations on a Homecoming, which is set in a bar in County Galway in the early 1970s. A compelling slice of life as it has been lived, it focuses on the return of a young actor Michael (Marty Rea) to the friends he had left ten years previously to build what we come to see has been a precarious career in New York.

As pints and shorts are downed, the evening follows a trajectory all too familiar where alcoholic excess is concerned. Somewhat stilted exchanges between the group are followed by talk that switches between the sentimental and aggressive, with the sharpest tongue exercised by Michael’s one-time best pal, the articulate teacher Tom (Garrett Lombard).

Through it all, the taciturn Junior (Rory Nolan) simply gets on with his Guinness. Surveying the table full of empty glasses before him as he leaves, he remarks: “I only meant to have the two pints.” In fact, he has had eight — and, since director Garry Hynes insists on doing things properly — it was the real thing.

After that, a good kip might have been expected. But on Saturday, when I saw DruidMurphy, all three plays were performed, and Conversations on a Homecoming was the first. The remarkable Mr Nolan has prominent roles in both the others. In A Whistle in the Dark, he plays tough-nut Iggy Carney who travels from Ireland, with equally thuggish brother Hugo (Garrett Lombard), youngest sibling Des (Gavin Drea) and their dreadful old dad (Niall Buggy) to sort out a family matter in Coventry. Billeting themselves on brother Michael (Marty Rea) and his Brummy wife Betty (Eileen Walsh), who want no part in the business, they are there for a potentially lethal fight with a rival gang of Irish criminals who resent the encroachment of another Carney brother, the psychopath Harry (Aaron Monaghan), into their territory.

Turned down by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as being too unrealistic (this was some years before the Krays’ conviction), the play went on to be a West End hit, his first, for Murphy. Clearly influenced by what came to be called the Theatre of Cruelty, the work is notable principally for its portrait of the paterfamilias Dada, whose notions of tough discipline and family honour strike a jarring note in the context to which they are applied.

The influence of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is acknowledged by Murphy on the third of the three plays, Famine, which is set in County Mayo in 1846 and deals with distressing events during the Irish potato famine. It can be seen most obviously in the character of village leader John Connor (Brian Doherty), a family man of dignity and honour (like The Crucible’s John Proctor), who counsels a moderate response from the community to the outrageous impositions and selfishness of their English landlords (one played by Rory Nolan, still going strong!).

As in the other two plays, music, in the form of the unaccompanied human voice, plays a major part in supplying atmosphere to the drama. So, too, does the beauty of the language: Murphy employs words as a poet would, and is always well served in their eloquent, lyrical expression by this amazing team of actors.

Not least of the attractions of seeing all three plays together (which can be done again on Saturday) is admiring the versatility of the performers. In this respect, let me commend particularly the work of Aaron Monaghan (startlingly good two years ago in Druid’s production of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie). This time we see him variously as a boozy businessman on the climb, a vicious villain and a rabble-rouser on crutches.

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