The Furrow
Runner-up in The Mercury Playwrighting Prize 2017.
Longlisted for the Papatango Award 2017
‘What people forget is that I’m in this house, day in day out. When you’re here all the time you get to know the rhythm of a place; to understand the way it breathes. You become part of it, sense its pulse. I know everything that goes on in this house and I shared it all with mother; told her everything. I know what she thought of you and I know what she did. And I can’t say I’d want to be drinking any sort of toast in this house, if it were me.’
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- While a young woman prepares for her wedding, her mother drifts towards death in an upstairs room. Meanwhile her crippled sister prowls the corridors with mischief in her heart and her maid plots a terrible revenge.
- But, when the play opens, where is the young woman’s maid and friend, Aine? And why has she been sent away from the house? What is the terrible secret that lies at the heart of these three young women’s lives?
- The Furrow is a doomed family saga set in an Anglo-Irish household in 1912. Ireland, is often referred to as ‘The Last Lost Raj in the Rain’ during this stage of its history. As the play unfolds we see all the terrible implications of this phrase for the women of the house.
- And what is Billy’s part in all this? Billy, the delivery driver for the local grocer, is a long-term friend of Aine. But is he more than that to this tragic figure?
- This ‘modern Greek-style tragedy’ was inspired by the ‘family paintings’ of Paula Rego.
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