The Body & Blood is the story of Maggie Murtagh, an Irish country girl who transmogrifies into The Vigilante Cannibal Nun during The Famine after the death of her family. She steals from the rich to give to the starving poor. She eats the colonizers; becomes an addict; and destroys her soul. Her story begins at the cusp of The Famine when she is betrothed, by her father, to a widower. She runs away to become a missionary nun in China but is sent back to Ireland three years later to set up a convent in Connemara, at the height of The Famine. On return, she discovers that her family are all dead. She goes on the rampage to seek revenge.

Award winning artist, filmmaker, and writer, Carol Murphy, performs, in verse, hyper colloquialisms intact, her one woman show, The Body & Blood. Murphy tells her original story of an Irish Famine folk anti-hero; from innocence to violence to the delusional ethics of the rural gangster to the living dead; from Maggie Murtagh to The Vigilante Cannibal Nun.

The Body & Blood uses the Irish Famine as a metaphor for madness and delivers an ecstatic rampage and a visually sumptuous response to the impotent rage and loss of agency one feels when confronted with the death and dying of the ones you love. It is a pantomime of pain.

“Murphy is a captivating performer, herself transmogrifiying into the bardic role with electrifying swagger and aplomb”
-A YOUNG(ISH) PERSPECTIVE

“Gripping Stage Presence has you hooked from start to finish”
-THEATRE AND TONIC

“Murphy is a whirlwind of a performer”
-FAIRY POWERED PRO

WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY Carol Murphy

Tickets €16 | €13 Student / OAP
Running time: 70 mins

References to sex, murder and violence.
Suitable forr ages 18+

About the company..
The Body & Blood was first produced by Carol Murphy as a series of five performance films which were launched at the beginning of 2022 at https://www.thebodyandblood.co.uk. Murphy then performed The Body & Blood live at The Black Box in Belfast, before taking the show to VAULT Festival in London at the beginning of 2023, to rave reviews. Since then, she has performed it at CQAF in Belfast and is due to perform it at The Courthouse in Bangor as part of the Open House Festival and at The Lyric Lounge. She plans to bring the show back to London and to the Edinburgh Festival in 2024, en route to writing it as a rock opera.

The creator and performer of The Body & Blood, Carol Murphy, is an artist, filmmaker, writer and performer from Belfast. She completed fine art residencies and film labs at Atelier’s 63, The Rutger Hauer Film Factory and The Binger Filmlab in Holland; The Turino Film Lab in Italy; STI’s First Draft & Beyond Lab; and DAS in Belfast. She won the RTÉ Filmbase Award; the Rankin Film & TV Collabor8te Scheme; and an NI Screen Shorts Award. Murphy has made four shorts; a body of art videos; a series of fashion films; and Finbar’s Private Netherland for the MAC. Feature scripts include Undeadable, Golden Boy and Sailortown. Murphy is currently writing The Silent Tide, a SCI FI Horror Thriller, with Fantastic Films in Dublin, with development funding from NI Screen.