Kavanagh’s Great Hunger to sate theatre appetites

THE Great Hunger, Patrick Kavanagh’s epic poem will be brought to Glór on Friday night. It is being performed as a one-man show by Jack Healy, of the Theatre Makers company.

 

First published some 70 years ago, the poem deals with the trials and tribulations of its central protagonist, Patrick Maguire, a small farmer in post-Treaty Ireland.

The poem explores some still relevant themes as Maguire fails to seize day after day as he watches in despair his life edging closer and closer to an unconsummated conclusion.

On his ‘headland of carrots and cabbage’ he dreams of an idyll of marriage and children but he still boasts to friends of his skill at avoiding both.

His life is an endless cycle of feeding hens, boiling the kettle, lighting the fire and giving cows their hay with only the certainty of Sunday mass or the meagre offerings of the local crossroads to look forward to, by way of social life. Yet sometimes when he is out on the land he enjoys the most profound, life-affirming experiences of the spiritual in nature.

This is Healy’s second one-man-show as he performed his own piece, Shostakovich, based on the life of the Soviet composer as part of the Cork Midsummer festival in 2009. He is the artistic director of Theatre Makers and is based in Cork.

Published in 1942, The Great Hunger is considered by some to be Kavanagh’s finest work.

In it he confronted an unpleasant side of his own background and by implication it repudiated those Irish writers who had sentimentalised rural Ireland. As the poem goes on, Maguire realises that his own self-denial, hard work and devotion to his mother had all led him to emotional desolation.

Critics praised the mix of poetic voices and rhythms in the work. When it was reprinted in Collected Poems in 1964, the New York Times Book Review contributor Richard Murphy called it ‘a great work’ which conveys ‘a terrible and moving image of human frustration’.

Kavanagh was born in 1904 in Monaghan to a father who was both a shoemaker and small farmer. He left school at a young age and worked on the family farm until his 30s. That experience presumably informed his work.