The Invasion of Melos: An Adaptation of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, by Colin Murphy

Synopsis:

In The Weak Suffer What They Must, the two sides in a vicious conflict come together for supposed peace talks. One side is a powerful empire; the other is a besieged neutral state. The besieged state, which faces annihilation, pleads international law and human rights. But the imperial power says there’s no such thing: the strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.

Adapted from the 2,500 year-old Melian Dialogue by Thucydides, from his classic History of the Peloponnesian War, this is a re-telling of one of the foundational stories about war and power, with acute lessons for our own time. It has come to the fore again in recent months, quoted by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at Davos and paraphrased by Trump aide Stephen Miller.

Bio:

Colin Murphy is a playwright, screenwriter, and journalist from Dublin, best known for his series of plays about Irish political history. Bloomsbury Methuen has just published a collected volume, Colin Murphy’s Political Plays. Other plays include The United States vs Ulysses, which toured to the Irish Arts Center, New York, last year, The Asylum Workshop (for TU Dublin Conservatoire) and Miasma (touring Ireland in April). His radio plays include #Antigone (for Newstalk) and the award-winning Hamlet, Prince of Derry (for RTÉ Drama on One). He is currently the Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub and last year was writer-in-residence with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He writes a weekly column for The Sunday Independent.