Tom Murphy

"The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel The Wake recounts the story of a woman, returning from the USA to her home town in Ireland. As her family learn of her years as a prostitute, she learns their attitudes and Irish society in general. A homecoming play, haunting yet fiercely comic.

"The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel

"The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel Modelled on Oliver Goldsmith's classic novel The Vicar of Wakefield, Murphy builds a comedy peopled with thieves, pimps, bawds, lechers and imposters who will prey on innocence unless God - or the ruling class - takes a hand. It centres around the downfall of Dr Primrose, who relates the misadventures that have caused his downfall and brought disintegration and ruin on his loved ones.

The third collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel "James in The Morning After Optimism is literally on the run, a comically exaggerated villain in flight form his crimes, seeking refuge in a fairytale forest. Harry in The Sanctuary Lamp is holed up in a church like a mediaeval outlaw, hoping to keep at bay the guilt of his messy life. JPW King in The Gigli Concert is a kind of cross between Dr Livingstone and Robinson Crusoe, a missionary who has become a shipwrecked loner, an Englishman sent to Dublin by a cult to convert the natives, and left there, beached and bereft." (Fintan O'Toole)

The second collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel In Conversations on a Homecoming, Michael returns from America to Ireland for a long-awaited reunion with his drinking companions: "A bilious bar-room comedy on the irreducible elements in the Irish character and the death of the Kennedy dream" (Observer), Bailegangaire "is as complex and haunting as one of Yeats' later poems... A senile bedridden old woman rehearses over and over again an epic tale of a village laughing match... Meanwhile her two granddaughters struggle to release themeselves from the prison of remembered unhappiness. "Here is a potent allegory - of the need to exorcise the past and its myths if one is to be happy in the future." (Sunday Telegraph) Tom Murphy was born in Tuam, County Galway, his other plays include Conversations on a Home Coming, Balegangaire and A Thief of Christmas; The Morning After Optimism, The Sanctuary Lamp and The Gigli Concert as well as more recently Cupa Coffee and The Wake (1996), and She Stoops to Folly. His career has been closely associated with The Abbey Theatre, Dublin who have produced many of his plays.

The first collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel Famine portrays the Great Hunger of the Irish in 1840s, with fresh pathos and insight, Patriot Games is a documentary drama charting the 1916 Easter rising and The Blue Macushla is a live gangster movie on stage set in the Republic of the 1970s with the politics of the Troubles emerging in Northern Ireland spilling over into the South.

"One of the greatest Irish plays of the century" (Irish Times) "The language of the play is on a sort of inspired bender. It surfeits on its own potency. Tom Murphy's gift - here and in his other plays - is at once to stimulate and destabilise. It's a thrilling and intense experience to sit in a theatre and hardly to know where you are or that anything exists beyond the stage in front of you... This is a dark, funny, consuming evening of high points, breaking points, hangovers and hints - uncertain hints - of hope" (Observer)