Cillian Murphy to star in stage version of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers

Enda Walsh to adapt Max Porter’s acclaimed novel about love, art and bereavement for Complicité theatre company’s Irish production

Cillian Murphy is to star in an Irish stage version of Max Porter’s celebrated novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. The production by the groundbreaking Complicité theatre company reunites the Peaky Blinders star with his regular collaborator Enda Walsh, who will direct his own adaptation.

Porter’s rich, lyrical tale follows an author who is reeling from the death of his wife, looking after his two young children and writing a book about Ted Hughes. He is visited one night by Crow, the eponymous avian character from Hughes’s poetry sequence, who enables the grieving family to deal with their pain. The novel was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award in 2015. In her review, Kirsty Gunn called it a “deeply moving book about death and its grief-stricken consolations – love and art”.

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