Views & Reviews
Here are some of the views and reviews of The Body & Blood since its launch online in January 2022 and after the live performances at The Black Box, Belfast in May 2022 and VAULT Festival, London in February 2023.
The Body & Blood – thebodyandblood.co.uk / Instagram / twitter / facebook / tumblr
Dig With It Magazine
This is the season of the Vigilante Cannibal Nun. Her name is Maggie Murtagh and she’s made an online visitation from the Irish Famine, feasting on raw innards of clergy, nobility, and English soldiers. She wears hip-hop bling and commits heretical acts. She channels trauma and terror and often, she’s as funny as all get-out.
Stuart Bailie
Coraleater on Instagram
You know when the algorithms throw you a bone and you get something new to love, we’ll thank goodness it’s you and Maggie.
Brilliant piece of work, words, look and delivery.
Refusing to watch all on one go, delayed gratification, although as a live piece I’d definitely be there.
Anyway thanks for bringing something beautiful into the world.
Libby McCormack, writer, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker, on Facebook after watching The Scowl, Episode 1.
This is really brilliant; gutsy, compelling and utterly original. I can’t wait for ep.2
Johnny Murphy actor, on Facebook
Totally transfixed by this work! Just brilliant.
The Body & Blood Live - The Black Box, Belfast
Mary-Kate O’Flanagan, Writer, Script Editor, Storyteller and Winner of The Moth
An astonishingly original piece of work performed with verve and humour by the creator. A rollercoaster ride through the story of a vigilante cannibal nun who embodies the suppressed rage and trauma of a people - leavened with sly humour and music. This work could only have come out of Belfast - and the mind of Carol Murphy. Not to be missed.
Liz Lordan, lover of art, film and culture on Instagram
I had the amazing fortune to see The Body and Blood at @theblackboxbelfast on Sunday night. @carolmurphyartworker was spellbinding as Maggie Murtagh a woman at the time of the Irish famine. It's an incredible story of a girl who escapes an arranged marriage and her family by becoming a nun. Maggie's story becomes a far more unusual one from that point onwards. Maggie does become a vigilante cannibal nun but she always maintained my sympathy, was darkly funny and had her own brilliant ideas around trying to make sense of the horror surrounding her. Carol Murphy is an incredible writer and performer. I so hope we hear more about Maggie Murtagh who is a character I will never tire of. This is too original and incredibly entertaining to be the end of her. Follow Carol on here and see the five short films that tell the beautiful and shocking story of the impish and charismatic Maggie Murtagh. You have never seen anything like this. www.thebodyandblood.co.uk
Ghouls on Film on Twitter
Splash Plastic on Instagram
Oh Carol! How you just held that room spell-bound on Sunday!!
Diane Ní Chionaoith on Facebook
Loved it Carol. Amazing performance. Can't wait to see where it takes you. Exciting times ahead me thinks
Nicolette Kay, writer, on Facebook
Rutger Hauer was right - you are the most interesting person in the room! I wish I could be there... Break a leg X
Connie McGrath on Instagram, Make-up Artist and collaborator on The Body & Blood
Super proud of my friend @carolmurphyartworker who performed her one-woman, sold-out show entitled 'Body & Blood' (about a vigilante cannibal nun named 'Maggie Murtagh'), at the Black Box this evening. It was INCREDIBLE to watch Carol's vision come into fruition after so many years in the making & I was honoured when she asked me to assist her a little bit with the makeup, which consisted of a lot of face paint and a wee touch of fake blood! What a show! 🎭 Well done, Carol! x
Johnny Murphy actor on Facebook
Was great to see Maggie live and unleashed!!
The Body & Blood Live - VAULT Festival, London
Theatre & Tonic: REVIEW QUOTE
Murphy serves as our narrator and is hypnotic as Maggie. Her gripping stage presence has you hooked from start to finish. Her ability to hold her own throughout the 70 minutes, with such heavy material, is a true talent. Her delivery was seriously impressive. Fast-paced but not challenging to follow, her whole body exuded expression with every line of dialogue. She truly embodied the character we were being told about.
This swiftly moves us onto the costume design. Murphy dons the floor embellished in gold jewellery, in an almost street bling style, serving as a trophy of those she has eaten. Along with this, she is masked in glowing warrior face paint, effective at reminding us this is a one woman’s battle for revenge against those that have wronged the women of Ireland who have no voice and will do nothing to save Ireland from its famine.
The Reviews Hub: REVIEW QUOTE
As the medium for all this, Murphy is entrancing. Her performance comes across as a mix between modern seanchaí, shaman and revivalist preacher with a penchant for pulp horror stories. It has more words per minute than any other show you’re likely to see, leading to an intense and dense hour and a bit. With this pace, it’s all too easy to get lost. If you do, God help you – there’s no slowing down or recapping to catch you up.
Fairy Powered Productions: REVIEW QUOTE
This is a story from a dark time in history, full of bleak themes and serious questions, but it is very funny – full of one liners and asides that take the audience out of the story and give them a chance to breathe. Murphy is a whirlwind of a performer, with magnificent physicality and exaggerating every cliché in Irish speech. Her writing has the same energy – teasing and probing with exciting energy and searing intelligence. I hope we see more of Carol Murphy and Maggie Murtagh in London soon.
A Youngish Perspective: REVIEW QUOTE
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, rulebreaking 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.
