The Great Hunger is a highly celebrated play from 1983. It is Tom Mac Intyre"s version of Patrick Kavangh"s famous long poem. It represents the life and dreams of Patrick MaGuire, a small farmer and potato-gatherer, a man suffering from sexual and spiritual starvation. The play fuses image, movement, and language into a classic of contemporary Irish drama. The Gallant John-Joe is the soliloquy of John-Joe Concannon, a widower grappling with physical and mental infirmity and trying unsuccessfully to plumb the mysteries of his relationship with his troubled daughter. His Lear-like cry, by turns tragic and uproariously funny, is both instantly recognizable and marvelously strange, a creation only MacIntyre could have brought to the stage, and the page.