A murder, an interrogation and a clouded world of fantasy and fear. Scorched Earth is part crime-drama, part thriller that plumbs a dark, but fundamental part of the Irish psyche. Murphy, creator of the multi-award-winning Volcano, blurs the lines of dance and theater to ask: What right do we have to the land beneath our feet? What are we willing to do to keep it?
Inspired by the John B. Keane’s seminal work The Field, Scorched Earth imagines a detective reopening a cold case, an unsolved crime twelve years after the fact. As stories are revisited and old wounds are opened, The Detective and Suspect fall into a world of memory, fantasy, ambition and resentment. As the interrogation continues and the clock ticks down, the stark space of the interrogation room transforms and morphs. Scorched Earth plumbs a dark, but fundamental part of the Irish psyche: a historic fixation with land and ownership.
