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”.

Murphy said that Porter’s novel “truly broke my heart when I first read it”, adding: “Complicité’s work on stage has inspired me for many years, and it is always a joy to get in a room with my most trusted collaborator and friend Enda Walsh.”

Murphy and Walsh both shot to fame with Disco Pigs, originally staged by the Corcadorca Theatre company in Cork in 1996. After a successful tour, Walsh’s play was then adapted for the screen, with Murphy resuming his role as the teenager Pig, who has a combustible relationship with his female friend Runt, played by Eileen Walsh.

Murphy went on to perform Walsh’s monologue Misterman and starred opposite Stephen Rea and Mikel Murfi in his existential knockabout comedy Ballyturk. Both plays opened at the Black Box in Galway and were subsequently staged at the National Theatre in London.

Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, co-produced by Complicité and Wayward Productions, has its world premiere at the Black Box in March then moves to the O’Reilly theatre, Dublin, the following month. It will tour in 2019.